Drilling for Dowels

Continuing on with the crib construction: This evening I drilled the holes in the crib rails for the dowel joinery.  The plans called for two 1/4″ inch dowels on each end of each rail.

I marked the lines on each rail before I rounded the sides on my router table. I can’t imagine how hard it would have been if I had to mark the lines after cutting the curves!

One bonus of having a floor-standing drill press is I can lower the table down enough to stand a 26″ piece of wood on its end, still having it fit beneath the business end of the drill press:

I dropped the table down, secured each rail on end with a wooden hand-screw clamp, then clamped that rig to the table:

This was looking like a solid setup, until I started drilling some holes. One disadvantage to buying a really old tool is that not everything works as well as it did when it was new.  The biggest problem I’ve found is that the clamps/hold-downs don’t grip as well as they should.  Both the table and the head unit will rotate around the pole, even when the hold-downs are tightened.  Because of this problem, not all of my holes lined up perfectly.

My rationalization: as long as I “perfectly” drill the reciprocating holes, this shouldn’t matter.  But that means I’ll need to figure out a way to really clamp those parts down so they don’t move. I can’t afford to screw up this next set of holes or the rails will look really shody.

That’s just the beginning of the tool maintenance I need to do before proceeding with the crib.  I also need to gussy up a block plane I recently bought.  There are some corner pieces I’ve already glued together that need some TLC on the edges. I can either sand and sharpen a block plane, which will fix many pieces going forward, or sand and sharpen just the pieces at hand.  I think I’ll choose the former – better ROI.  Not to mention my recently discovered disdain for excessive sanding…