Crib Coming Together

I spent several hours in the garage this evening, attending to a few different aspects of Briana’s crib. I built my first frame and panel door, which will front the vertical cabinet on the right side of the crib:

I ended up routing the groove through the entire length of each rail and stile, mostly because I’m not nearly comfortable enough to attempt to drop the workpiece onto a spinning router bit.  That, coupled with the laziness that prevented me from build a jig to properly support a router to plunge into the workpiece have left me with four small holes I need to fill. I have plenty of scrap pieces of the oak I’m using for this project, so I’ll rip some 1/4″ strips (the width of the groove) to wedge in there and trim flush.

I also got the sides of that cabinet assembled and dry fit (if you can call standing them on end “dry fit” on the crib’s base:

The last thing I did tonight was to sand the rails to 120 grit.  I had previously sanded them with 60-grit sand paper, just enough to remove a few burn marks left by the round-over router bit. I had done that sanding by holding the rail in one hand and a sanding block in the other.  That was quite the effort, not to mention stressful on both my hands, so I was determined to find a better way for this round of sanding. I decided to treat the rails like a blade to sharpen.  I set the sandpaper on my table saw:

held in place with two of the rails I’m working.  I held the sandpaper down with my left hand (via the rail) and worked the rail across the paper in my right hand:

I got into a good rhythm and I think I this was a decent method to ease the amount of work during this round of sanding. Does anyone out there know of a better way to sand these mostly round pieces, short of buy a spokeshave and building a shaving horse?  I figure I’ve got one more round of sanding for the rails (likely at 220 grit) and anything that reduces the time I spend sanding is worth investigating!