Baby Crib – Take 1

The first bold step I’ve taken in this new hobby of mine was to declare that I wanted to build our first child’s crib myself, rather than buying something prefabricated; even Ikea “building” wasn’t good enough for me.  Like most projects (from what I gather) of a part-time garage woodworker, my timeline for completing the crib has slipped a little bit.  Our little bundle of joy:

is now a little over two months old and still sleeping in her pack’n'play – a situation that Mrs. ShopOwner is none too pleased about.  I figure if we aren’t “almost done” by the time the child is three months, I should have no trouble finishing the crib because I’ll likely be sleeping in the garage.

Back to the crib.  When we were searching around for ideas plans, we found a few that struck our fancy and finally decided on this U-Bild set of plans that we ordered from Rockler:

Right now I’m just focusing on the crib itself, and not the hutch that is also spelled out in the plans. Over several weekends, I’ve methodically been cutting all of the pieces to size, out of I don’t know how many board feet of 1″ red oak and three different thicknesses of plywood.  In fact, I’ve cut all but one of the necessary pieces I need for the project.  I would have all of them cut, but I made a few mistakes this past Sunday which will require me to go buy more 3/4″ oak plywood.  In the meantime, I decided to start shaping what will be the rails on the sides of the crib.

The plan doesn’t call for any edge rounding, chamferring, or other rounding of any of the surfaces, but I dedided I wanted something a little smoother – something with a little more character to give the impression that I didn’t just follow a set of instructions from start to finish.  Originally, I had planned on using my new Porter-Cable bullnose router bit to do the shaping, so I would only need to make two passes on each piece of wood.  Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the 1/2″ collet for my router, so I ended up using a roundover bit with a 1/4″ shaft.  The bit worked great, I just needed to make twice as many cuts. I set up my router table:

using a featherboard I fashioned out of a scrap of plywood:

This was quite handy, as I didn’t have to worry nearly as much about keeping the workpieces against the fence as I would have needed to without the featherboard. Another nice thing about this setup is that there are two switches, one on the router itself and one on the router table. It gives me a lot of peace of mind knowing I have to turn it on in two places before the bit starts spinning.  I got everything in place, safety goggles on, my shop vac dust collector running, and began making sawdust.  108 passes over the roundover bit later I had a nice set of rails ready for sanding:

I’ll spend a good deal of time on each rail with various grits of sandpaper, smoothing out the edges and taking care of a few burn marks along the way.  Thankfully these pieces don’t need to be identical (length aside), so a few dissimilarities should add character to the piece.  At least, that’s what I’m telling myself.  The marks on the end grain are centering marks for this plan’s favorite joinery method - wooden dowels.  Drilling each of those holes is a pleasure I’m trying to put off for as long as possible.