I’m posting this for those that might already have hardcopy project plans or drawings and may want to build with your CNC machine. Why start from scratch when you already have plans.
A couple years ago I bought a Rocking Horse Kit and was planning to build it for my youngest granddaughter. When I received the kit I discovered the rocking horse was small and not large enough for her. I set the kit aside till now. I’m not recommending this kit as I don’t like the choice of wood included in the kit. This would be fine if you want to paint your completed kit.
I have some friends that are expecting their first child so I decided to build the Rocking Horse as a gift. I also want to digitize the plans and upgrade the design. We will probably also make a scaled up version.
I used the technique of importing scanned images from either the plan drawings or actual pieces from the kit. I imported the scanned image each component into VCP and drew the vectors using a tracing technique. When I’m drawing the vectors I double check the measurements.
I Created VCP files for each group of components. Then I copied the parts to a single file to create a composite assembly and simulation. I did this to roughly show details and upgrades. The simulation shows cuts in some pieces because we just over lay the parts. We are not using any of these toolpaths from the composite drawing.
For this Rocking horse we modified a spacer to add a tail and we replaced the head with a new one with 3D horse head. We made the head two sided by carving a left and mirrored right side and will glue the two halves to a center spacer. Then we added inlays to some of the components as follows. We added a Teddy Bear to the seat, Saddle belt to the body, hooves to the legs and simple inlays to both sides of the rocker arches.
We are using some of the original kit materials on the first build On future builds we will cut all the parts on the CNC machine. We made copies of some of the component programs and moved parts to facilitate clamping of the pre-cut parts. We built a fixture for the rocker arches as this part is longer than the table on my machine. We are also using tiling to cut the rocker arches. We also added some dado joints to the piece that joins the legs to the rocker arches
This project is in progress but on hold as I need to get some more materials to complete.
I’m attaching a picture from the original plan and one of the simulated assembly.
- Assembly Simulation
- Original Kit
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