C'est Fini!

After 3 magical beard-and-flannel-shirt filled days last weekend at Popular Woodworking's Woodworking in America conference I finally got to spend some much needed time in the basement (shop) wrapping up the crib for our soon-to-be daughter. It was good to get this one done.

You can see part of the baby's room that Nisha has spent so many hours on. She's really busted her butt painting all sorts of fun little critters on the walls. I'll try to rustle up some pics of the room.

I struggled with the design of the crib and am not quite happy with how it turned out.
I went on an Amazon.com book buying glut over the summer and during the madness picked up Robert Lang's book of shop drawings of Greene and Greene furniture. After marveling at the fantastic contents of the book, I decided that I'd just steal design cues from some various pieces in the book and impress my friends and family by calling my crib a "Greene and Greene" styled work. I doodled on paper and Google Sketchup for many hours until I finally arrived/conceded with what I thought was a workable design. It looked adequate to my not-very-developed eye for design in Sketchup; with Nisha's due date swiftly approaching I decided to start applying steel to wood.

The finished product is made of cherry with a hand-rubbed blonde shellac finish. The crib knocks down to four sides and four legs, which is quite handy when one would like to remove the crib from the workshop and install in a nursery. The whole thing is held together with 8 1/4-20 socket head cap screws, which thread through the tenons on the short rails into threaded inserts installed into the tenons of the long rails. I'm in the process of making some ebony plugs to hide those ugly screw heads. It's rock solid when assembled.

"That looks to be a lot of mortise and tenon joints.", one might observe.

"Yes, it is", I would reply. "108 of them. But who's counting?"

I nearly went crazy cutting mortises and tenons. Lots and lots of chisel work, though I did cheat a bit with a router on the 92 mortises in the top and bottom rails.

I had a grand vision of not using sandpaper on the crib and was almost able to pull it off. Every surface of every piece was finished with a smoothing plane or a chisel, but decided to touch up with 320 sandpaper (the devil) to tame a few instaces of tearout and bring everything to a uniform luster. I need to convince Nisha I need an infill smoothing plane or contemporary plane with a high bedding angle to help fight tearout. Or get off my duff and make one with that 3x3x12 cocobolo turning blank I bought at Rockler a couple months back.

I buffed the shellac finish with 0000 steel wool to get things nice and uniform. Normally I'd use paste wax to finish buffing, but with the near certainty of voracious little gums and teeth being applied to the slats and rails I decided against it. I'm not sure if paste wax is baby-compatible.

Feel free to offer a critique of what would make help to make it more 'purdy. I would welcome the advice.