Here's a small rocking horse design for anyone stumbling across this page who might wish to build somehting similar. The rocking horse is suitable for toddlers (generally, about 1 to 3 but sometimes even younger kids can climb up on it.) At this point, I'm just including some photos, but in the next few days I'll add measurements and templates.
This rocking horse is not entirely original. Visiting a show home about 40 years ago, a small rocking horse caught my eye. I made some mental measurements, and this horse approximates what I saw that day. The problem with the original was that the head was not very horsey at all - it look more like the face of the bulldog, and there was no mane. So those are my two original contributions to this design.
The photos are of a slightly beat-up horse that had its share of use by kids.
The head is attached to the neck through a butt joint, with a screw hidden behind the mane. That screw goes into the dowel that's used as a handle, to hold it in place. The neck and tail are attached to the seat with two strong twisted dowels. The legs have open mortises to fit around the rockers to which they are glued, and the footrest is attached to the rockers in a similar way.
There are three tricky aspects to the construction. The first is the procedure to construct the mane, which I will be outlining below (soon). The second is the attachment of the legs into the seat, because these legs go out at two angles relative to the body. The third is the degree of slope of the rockers - if you have too much, the kid will rock right over and hit the floor. This happened with the first one I built, but after I modified the design, it never happened again to my knowledge on any of the rocking horses I built.
Further information on the construction will be added in the next few days.
