Building a Kit Rocking Horse

With the assembled stand put safely to one side, I started on assembling the body of the horse.  Using some coarse 80-grit sandpaper, I quickly cleaned up all the edges of the mating surfaces to remove all the loose fibres and bits of tear-out that were left from the milling process - I didn't want anything to stop the two halves from coming together as closely as possible. Working on a soft surface, I laid one body half on top of the other to check the fit; I was pleasantly surprised to find that this was very good.  The mating surfaces were very flat, so they went together well with only a hairline gap visible in a couple of places - nothing that couldn't easily be clamped out during glueing. The body halves are located together using dowels - two at the bottom, front and rear, and a thinner dowel through the horse's eye holes.  Each of the dowel holes goes right through the body, so I marked the centre of each dowel before applying some PVA glue and tapping them into

Building the rocking horse's stand is quite straightforward. There are only eight parts and everything is pre-drilled so there's no measuring or laying out required. Before going further, I must apologise for the small number of photos in this post - I didn't take enough of this stage of the build, but it's all fairly self-explanatory so I don't think too much is lost. The parts are: the top rail, the bottom rail, the two turned vertical posts, two large feet and two small feet. The top and bottom rails, and the two large feet, all have large-diameter mortice holes pre-drilled to accept the cylindrical tenons on either end of the turned posts. I dived straight in and glued and screwed the four feet to the bottom rail, using the pre-drilled pilot holes for alignment; unfortunately I then found that the mortice holes in the large feet didn't quite line up with the holes in the bottom rail, so that the posts' tenons wouldn't fit. I spent 20-30 minute