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.