Baby Cradle

I’ve gotten pretty far along here in constructing this baby cradle but not as far along as the mother has! The baby was delivered on the 29th of February-a Leap year baby! I thought I had until the 14th of March to complete this but-now I’m behind!
When I decided to start this project, I had an idea but no plans and decided it would just have to be built from the bedding sizes available from a store selling mattresses for cradles. So after having discovered that several stores listed 18” x 36” as sheet sizes for cradles, I started. I deduced that the overall cradle had to be 38 1/2” long this left 1/2”mattress clearance on each end inside cradle for bedding and finger access. Inside width was 18” I didn’t feel I needed any additional clearance for mattress as the sides of the cradle would be angled outward. Next I cut two rails to length of 37” and mortised them to the maximum depth of my chisel/mortise attachment which mounts on my drill press-I could only get 3”deep. So I ripped the two rails with the tablesaw fence set at 2 3/8” this was the bottom rail size and with 1/8” width lost to the saw blade, the top rail was left with 1/2” deep perfectly mating 3/8” square mortises. The table mounted router was set up using a 3/16” round over bit and all 4edges of the 4rails were rounded. Cradle side height had been decided on as being 18 1/2” so this left the picketts at being 13 3/8” long-I used 1/2”long tennons. Using stock I milled to 3/4”X6 1/4”X13 3/8” the dado blade for the tablesaw was set to 1/2”width and 3/16”high so that I could cut the shoulder,face, and length of the tenons by passing the width of 6 1/4” stock top and bottom faces over the dado blade. There were 5 pieces of 3/4”x6 1/4×13 3/8” stock used. The tablesaw fence was set up at 5/8” from a thin kerf blade and the stock was then ripped the 13 3/8” length in order to yeild 8pieces of 5/8”x3/4”x13 3/8” stock with almost complete tenons on each end-this was repeated with the other pieces until i had actually 40 picketts. I lowered the table saw blade to 1/8” and moved the saw fence with a stop block set to allow me to cut the remainig two shoulders of the tenons. The 3/16” round over bit was still in the router/so all four edges of the picketts got a pass over it. This resulted in some very nice shaped picketts I thought. I inserted the picketts in both bottom rails and dropped the top rails in place just to check everything for fit-amazing, no further work needed.
I’ll insert a few pic’s and get back to the blog latter. I’ve still got to get this baby ready!


Cradle Prefinish

Finished Trestle

-- woodbutcher north carolina