Rocking Horse Poop

I came up with this project as a joke response to the old saying that something is as rare as rocking horse poop, hopefully it will tickle your sense of humour too.

Supplies

Materials:

Scrap wood - Both my pieces of wood came from a single length of, I think, pallet wood. I sectioned the wood to eliminate a bunch of nail holes.

5 1/2 inches by 3 3/4 inches for the poop

9 1/2 inches by 3 3/4 inches for the rockers

Thickness is 10/16 inches

Pritt glue stick

Wood glue

Tools:

Scroll saw (I don't have any information on the blade type I used)

Belt sander

Bobbin sander

Step 1: Design

I designed my project using the CAD tool Onshape and printed out the drawings to scale once I was satisfied with the design.

Step 2: Construction

I cut out and glued (Pritt Stick) the parts templates to the wood.

I cut out the parts from the wood using the scroll saw.

I peeled off the parts templates from the wood pieces

I sanded the front and back of the rockers and poop using a belt sander.

I aligned as best I could the 2 rockers. glued them together then sanded the sides trying to even out the differences.

I glued on the remaining section, the poop, to the top of the rockers.

Step 3: Reflections

I have only started using a scroll saw within the past month having done five of the introductory projects in John A Nelson's Scroll Saw Workbook (Fox Chapel Publishing). As you can see from the above photo my line following needs some work as does doing a turn in place such as at the inner corner where the circle met the swoop of the rocker, caused by pushing the work forward not holding it in place while turning it. I also think I need some time to come to terms with the slower pace of scroll saw work as I keep thinking it will zoom through wood like a band saw.

I chose to cut out the two rockers individually, I would have achieved better results by stacking them together and cutting both of them at once they would have matched up and I would have saved myself some sanding. I used the smallest size bobbin sander element I could find but it was still too big to get into the corners of the rockers.

In my initial design I intended the poop to be sandwiched between the two rockers but after cutting the pieces it seemed better to glue the rockers together and then stick the poop to the top of the rockers.