56 Bottles of Beer on the Wall

Last weekend I made good progress on the front and back of the crib. These two parts are similar in that they both consist of cherry rails connected by a number of curly maple slats. How many slats, you ask? 14 -- on each side. That's a total of 28 slats, and each one needs two mortise and tenon joints (for the top and bottom.) So, that's 56 mortise and tenon joints to cut.

56 mortises is a job for a dedicated mortising machine, which performs the magical task of drilling a square hole. I bought this machine a while ago because I got sick of cutting mortises with a router, which requires a complex jig and results in a rounded mortise. A bench-top mortiser is essentially a drill press with a special hollow chisel bit that attaches to the head. Inside the hollow chisel is an auger bit that drills a circular hole -- the chisel on the outside squares up the hole.

Even with the mortising machine it takes a while to cut 56. The third picture shows the four rails, each with 14 mortises. The narrow rail is the top and the wide rail is the bottom. The wide rails will eventually be cut with a curve, but it's easier to clamp the joint before the curve is cut.

The next step is to cut tenons on each of the slats. Again, we've got 56 joints to cut, so it needs to be efficient. I could have used my table saw tenoning jig, which produces very nice tenons, but would take forever. Instead I set up the table saw with a dado blade, which is much faster, but cuts a fairly rough tenon. The last two photos show one mortise and tenon -- not a bad fit!

The bars

Last weekend I finally got back to work on the crib: I cut the curly maple boards into strips that will become the slats. The band saw is a great tool for this job. First, the blade is thin and leaves a very narrow kerf, so very little wood is wasted. Second, it's simpler to cut uniform strips without a complex and dangerous set up, as would be required on the table saw.

The band saw jig is very simple: it consists of a wood strip cut to a rounded point at one end. The strip is clamped to the band saw table with distance between the tip and blade set to the width of the slat. The trick is that as long as the left side of the board touches the point, the slat will come out the right width, even if I don't hold the board perfectly straight.

The only downside of the band saw is that the resulting edge is rough. After each slat is cut, I re-joint the edge of the board before I cut the next slat. Once all the slats are cut I use the planer to get a smooth surface on both sides. The third picture shows a set of slats (for the front) all cut and planed.

In the last picture you can get a sense of what the front and back of the crib will look like with the rails and slats in place. Notice that I cut the slats from 6/4 curly maple, so the side of the board becomes the face of the slat (which is 5/8" thick). The next step will be to cut mortise and tenon joints along the top and bottom of the rails.