Woodworking Magazine

I just discovered Woodworking Magazine, a quarterly publication that appears to be styled after Cook's Illustrated (one of my long-time favorites). It's not easy to find on the newsstand, and it only comes out four times a year. But I've seen two issues so far, and they were both excellent. The articles are very good, and like Cook's there are no ads.

Design

We've finally settled on a design for the crib. It follows the style I've used in most of the furniture I've built: a mix of classic (Shaker-ish) and contemporary. I really like to mix woods, especially maple and cherry. The basic shape has a few gentle curves to it, but it's not overly swoopy and ornate (it is a boy, after all). I made the model using Google SketchUp (which is a fantastic program) and generated 2D images from it.

We've gone back and forth on the design of sides. Originally, the sides were going to be slats, just like the front and back. Recently we've been playing around with solid sides, which you can see in the pictures (the top picture shows solid on one side and slats on the other). The nice thing about solid sides is that we can add funky cut-outs: one idea is to have a moon and stars on one side, and a sun on the other. One tricky part: the cut-outs have to conform to the same guidelines for safety (i.e., no gap bigger than 2 3/8").

Gettin' the band back together

Last week I received a wonderful birthday present: a new bandsaw! OK, I bought it myself, but my family contributed generously. After some research I settled on the Grizzly 14" model. It took the better part of a day to put it together -- and I had to get clever to get the saw (which weighs about 250 pounds) on top of the stand. I've only cut one board, but I can see that there's a learning curve. My knowledge of tablesaws is completely useless here: adjusting the bandsaw involves things like "tracking" and "tensioning". Once it's all set up, though, I have a feeling I'll wonder how I ever got along without it! (The dorky goggles shot is courtesy of my lovely wife.)

Jet plane (actually, Delta)

Last weekend (actually a week ago) I thickness planed all the boards, which is a big, noisy, dusty job. Definitely not the fun part of woodworking. You can really see how pink cherry wood is when it's first planed. The curly maple looks great. The third picture shows the machine that does all the work. This process filled two of those giant paper leaf bags completely with saw dust.

The big problem now is the design: since I still haven't settled on the design I can't really take the next step. The general idea is to have a frame made of cherry and slats made of curly maple. We've been talking about making the sides solid wood, and perhaps having a design cut into them -- maybe a moon on one side and a sun on the other.