My oldest daughter who seems to be the recipient of all my furniture projects
was expecting her first child and my first grandchild. She never new what cherry
looked like until I started making furniture and now she'll have nothing less.
I told her to surf the web for a cradle style which she liked and she pointed me
to the Rockler
Heritage Cradle plans, which I ordered.
In the title I state that my cradle is based on the Rockler plans and that is because
I changed the joinery and panels. The rockler plans uses screws to attach the side
rails to the head/foot boards and the strecher to the legs. It also constructs
the head/foot boards in frame and panel construction. I opted for solid construction
and through mortise and tenon for the rails and pinned M&T for the strecher.
I made the mortises with my Shop Fox Mortiser and the tenons on my table saw using
my Freud SD206 dado set..
Finish: The cherry was given 2 coats of natural Watco and 2 coats of Minwax wipe-on
poly. Final sanding to 600 and a coat of paste wax.
Unfortunately I didnt document it with pictures very well.
At
right you can see the first weekends work on spindles. I made 35 in all and used
30. I made them by transferring the transition points to the blank and turning
them by eye. Towards the end I was going from blank to varnish in less than 20
minutes. I could only work about 4 hours a day on them before my neck got stiff.
I
made the legs by laminating 3 pieces of cherry to get the 2.5" thickness.
Since the legs were to be 36" long and my lathe only goes to 34, I had to make
finials separately. At left are the legs right off the lathe and right is the finished
leg assembly minus the finials. The foot members are M&T as well.
Here's the dry fit of the spindles and rails.
Here at left the spindles have been glued into the rails and I'm dry fitting the
rails and their through M&T with the unfinished headboards..
At right everything's glued and coated with oil.
Below are a couple of pictures of the complete cradle after glue up, oiled but before
poly (still minus finials).
The next series of pictures are of the finished product. Thanks for looking.