This week was the long Thanksgiving Weekend which gave me a great opportunity to finish the final shaping of the chair parts, sanding, assembly and staining for Rafaela's Rocking Horse Chair.

Finished product

I started by reducing the apparent thickness of the profile of the chair seat by creating a deep 45 degree bevel on the underside of the chair seat with a 45 degree router profile bit. You have to do this in several passes so that you take shallow cuts and don't bog the router bit down too fast.

By cutting a bevel on the bottom it makes the seat board look much thinner from profile.

Next I switched to a deep bullnose router bit to establish the shape of the seat saddle contours. The first cut creates the edge of the back of the saddle. I used a template to create an offset and a bushing to follow the template.

I then established the depth of the seat saddle by cutting the template smaller and smaller on each pass and setting the depth of the router bit a bit deeper on each pass until I got into the center of the saddle. And then I started reducing the depth of the router bit as I got to the last passes. The effect is it's slightly deeper in the middle.

Once I had the depths established I then used a series of power grinding attachments to shape the bottom of the seat saddle starting with a medium grit Kutzall disk. The Kutzall disk is a bit aggressive but predictable and it doesn't tend to grab like other cutting heads. And then I switched to a flap wheel on the grinder to get to the general shape.

I finished the seat saddle shaping with the random orbital bit sander and worked up through the grits from 80 to 220 grit.

I had to do some final details to the horse's head I had been putting off since the final steps required drilling holes into it and a single mistake could be a big problem after all this work. The first holes required me to drill 3/4 inch holes for the eyes. By using a flat spade bit with a simple center point the spade bit is pretty predictable.

I then couldn't resist popping the eyes in for a moment and it really made the whole head come alive.

The eyes looked so good I couldn't help but put the horse's mane on temporarily.

a little foreshadowing here..... see how long the mane is? - I thought it needed to be a bit shorter to not get tangled in feet. Next time I'll be a bit more patient.

In order to mount the mane I needed to cut a grove along the neck starting with a series of drill holes and a chisel.

But the bottom of the grove was pretty rough so I used a small handheld router and a set of files to clean up the bottom of the groove.

After gluing the armrest bow to the seat I did the final shaping of the armrest. The armrest has a few distinctive shapes starting with some formal and some casual. The one fancy detail is to hand cut two swan's neck details at the edges of the top of the backrest. The swan's neck is shaped by first drawing the general shape and then cutting to just outside of the line with a fret saw followed with rasps, files and sandpaper.

But the resulting detail is crisp and adds a bit of formality and tradition to the chair form.

Then you can either leave the arms crisp or soft. I chose to soften the arms by drawing a line representing the general extent of how far I wanted to round over the arms and then progressing through a series of rasps, files and sandpaper until I had a pleasing shape.

I had to decide how I wanted to stain and finish the whole chair. Below is a picture of the major staining and finishing products I used for this chair. The two general finishes dye stains were used only on the head. The other finishes were used on the whole piece after the head was joined to the rest of the chair. I have grown to like a shop made rubbing finish layered up in the two glass jars made with 3 coats of a mix of equal parts Boiled Linseed Oil / Mineral Spirits and then extra 3 coats of essentially the same mix of equal parts BLO / Mineral Spirits / Spar Urethane. Some people go straight to the second mix, but I find I can get deep penetrating properties with only the BLO / Mineral Spirits and it remains soft and easy to wipe on and off, but once you start adding a urethane for hardness it will start to get thick and sticky if you don't do very thin layers. This time I also tried another product at the very last step with one coat of Odie's Oil a hard wax finish that I really like. It goes a very long way so you simply buff it on with an applicator pad which also tends to smooth the final coat anyway, then you simply buff it off with a clean rag. The Odie's oil can be used all by itself also but what I really like is it can be renewed easily and it leaves a supple slippery soft finish.

Since the horse's head is the center piece I decided to try and stain it to look like a chestnut horse. I had some general finish water based dye stain that was recommended to make a good approximation of mahogany and the recommendation was to use 7 parts orange with 4 parts medium brown. It was darker than I expected but I still like it, I suspect the end grain of the maple plies absorbed more dye than expected of a solid hardwood. In fact it looks almost like walnut.

After the basic water based dye stain. After 6 coats of BLO / Mineral Spirits this looks very rich.

By the time I did the final assembly I had done so many dry-fit practices that I didn't take any photos of the horse before I started doing the BLO / Mineral Spirits 6 coats.

Once all teh finishing was complete, the final two steps were to glue in the eyeballs and attach the mane. The eyeballs are generally just epoxied in. But the instructions recommended painting the back of the eye socket a light color so that light would be reflected through the eyeball. I'm really glad I did this step. Without the white at the back of the eyeball no light gets in or out and the eyeball is really flat, especially against such a dark background dye stain. But with some white at the back the opaque eyeball now really comes alive.

All three of these eyeballs are exactly the same. I placed teh left and center ones here just for an example of how different backgrounds impact the reflection and livelihood of the eye. The upper right one is against a white eye socket, the center one is just against my flesh and the one to the left has a very dark background. See what a difference that makes?

The final step was to insert the mane. The mane was built for a much larger horse so the first thing I had to do was to approximate how long I wanted the mane to be and so I chose a length that would be just shorter than where I imagine their foot will rest and then I cut the mane to length using a straightedge. The next thing I did was to nail the mane into the neck groove (slot) with the included leather strip to add a decorative touch. In practice the groove I cut was a bit deep so I filled that gap with compressible black weather stripping so that the leather strip would be closer to flush to the top of the neck groove.

Note - for those of you men who aren't used to long hair or cutting hair at all, this is a good time to perhaps pause, be patient and ask your loving spouse, a mother or a professional. If I had this to do over again I would have installed the mane before I cut it. My logic was to cut it a bit long at the base where teh foot would rest and then cut a straight line, but as you can imagine, I missed thinking about how the mane would lay across the neck as it goes up it's curved so I got a bit of an unsightly concave cut at the bottom which I then had to clean up. It looks fine in teh end, but I cut off more mane than I probably needed to. Fortunately of all the steps, this is the one that is most easily reversed. If Rafaella wants a different cut, or if she ever decides to give the horse's mane a 5 year old's haircut we can easily order a spare mane later..

And finally - since this is my last post on this particular project I want to give credit to the Rocking Horse Shop which is where I started. I ended up making a completely custom design but I was inspired by the videos and plans that I purchased from them and eventually I will get back to the larger horse.

https://www.rockinghorse.co.uk/shop/make-your-own/accessories-tack?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIiJSwtZK89AIVGqd3Ch0gIQehEAAYASAAEgIUqvD_BwE

That's all for now, Have a great week and I hope that as you prepare for Christmas you have an opportunity to make something for someone special to put under a tree.