Building a Kit Rocking Horse

At this stage, with the stand and the horse's body completely assembled, I decided to make a small modification to the two rails.  These are the lengths of wood to which the horse's feet get bolted, and which receive the ends of the hangers.  As supplied, these were shaped to a point at each end, and were pre-drilled for the hangers, but they had sharp square edges. As all the stand's parts had nicely chamfered edges, I decided to add a chamfer to the rails as well. Rails as supplied - note the sharp edges The only slightly tricky thing here was to NOT chamfer the two areas on each rail where the horse's feet would go; I didn't want to be left with a gap where the chamfered edge ran under the feet. With the stand and the horse's body and legs assembled, I dry-fitted everything together so that I could lower the horse on the rails, drill holes for the horse's mounting bolts, and mark the outline of where each foot overlapped onto the rail. With this

The horse's legs are supplied as simple shapes cut from a single sheet of plywood (not laminations like the body) with some milling on the outside of each leg to give it a more horse-leggy shape. Importantly, the inside face of each leg is bevelled where it joins the body - this is what makes the legs splay out slightly from the body when it's all assembled. As with the body, this is done very accurately so it all fits together perfectly without any adjustment or fettling required. Each leg has two dowels to locate it into place on the body; both the leg and the body have pre-drilled dowel holes which makes fitting the legs very easy. Two screws per leg are also supplied, but there are no pre-drilled holes for the screws, so I just selected a spot for each screw that looked reasonable - not too close to the dowels, and also ensuring that the screw would bite into a solid bit of the body behind. Drill a 4mm hole through the leg for each screw, and countersink each hole to ma