Baby Furniture #10: Final Pics

Beautiful. It’s lots of fun pushing our limits, isn’t it.

-- Adrian ..... The 11th Commandment...."Thou Shalt Not Buy A Wobble Dado"

very nice good job

-- jeanmarc manosque france

Great job Kevin! An heirloom for generations to come. You just can’t buy this kind of quality any more.

-- Randy, Tupelo, MS ~ May I become more like the Master Carpenter every day.

Very nicely done sir. A beautiful crib that sure to be an heirloom.

-- When you give someone a chance it may well be their last.

great looking crib I like the lettering how did you do it?

In the interest of time, we “cheated” on the lettering. I didn’t use a knife and chisel like the “old” pros would suggest. I used a router and inlay bit. Basically it is just a small router bit with a collar, then there is a bushing that you put on when cutting the background (walnut). Pull the bushing off and cut the foreground (sycamore). This worked pretty good. You cannot make a square corner or really small inlays, but it worked fine for what I was doing.

Oh yeah, I just used the inlay bit for the outside edge. For hogging out the material I used a combination of 1/2” router bit and a good set of chisels.

-- Kevin, Wichita, Kansas

Kevin,
You’ve answered a bunch of my questions so far, but I’ve gota few more. I remember you said that you changed hardware midway through the project. What did you go with and are you happy with it?

Also, the mattress looks somewhat high. I know the front gate is down in the photos, but is this a normal height? Can the mattress be lowered when your kid is big enough to stand?

I’m so glad you saw this blog through to the end. I’m amazed to see someone that says they haven’t done much woodworking make such a great project. I really enjoyed following along with such an ambitious undertaking.

All it needs now is a KS Wildcat. ;-)

-- Only the Shadow knows....................

The mattress is on its highest setting and the front gate is lowered in the pictures. The mattress does drop down lower for when they can stand. These measurements were set according to the Federal government standards. I’ll have to find them again and post them for you all.

As far as the hardware goes, my original plan was to use this hardware from Rockler. http://www.rockler.com/product.cfm?page=1408&filter=crib

Then I decided that I didn’t want to see the gate hardware at all. It some searching, but I finally found a place to get hidden hardware. If anyone is thinking of building a crib, or already has one, these guys have a lot of replacement parts for many different types. Also very good customer service. http://www.productsamerica.com/ I used this hardware: http://www.productsamerica.com/page58.html
I also bought some longer bolts to bolt the back together. I used bolts so I could take it apart and store it.

This wasn’t the cheapest way to go by far, but it does give you a crib with no visible gate hardware. For some reason that was important to me.

-- Kevin, Wichita, Kansas

I thought about a Powercat in the back instead, had some really purple looking honey locust, but we went with the name.

-- Kevin, Wichita, Kansas