cherry | The Lighthearted Woodworker

I recently finished up two loft beds for my son and daughter and I realized that before I blogged about that I needed to actually post the final results of the Twin Cradle. I know, I know. I’m a terrible blogger. But then again, on the internet time kinda stands still. I could blog about about anything and pretend it’s current. Half the time I go back and catch up on ancient blog posts filling my reader. Well enough procrastinating… Here in one post is the end of the Cradle Series.

Twin Cradle; Part 4 The Wrap up

Well the twins are off to college by now…well not really, but they have certainly outgrown this cradle.

You might remember that one of my goals as to build this sans hardware. I wanted it to be a piece of furniture that could be quickly assembled and then knocked down for easy storage. It needed to be a beautiful piece of “temporary” furniture. I’ll let you be the judge.

The finished product

My wife provided a luxurious pad for them to sleep on.

I was very happy with the grain selection in this beautiful piece of cherry.

A side view showing the curves and the divider

This little piece I designed to hold the divider in place.

…said divider in place.

The divider can easily be removed, allowing the twins to sleep together.

I designed & built foot rests on each side, so the cradle could be easily rocked with your feet.

The peg and though mortise

Introducing Alex and James!

Me and the best clients a guy could ask for!

So that wraps my cradle series. I’ll post one more related post on how I built the pegs, so look for that. Then I’ll catch up and share the loft beds. I’ve also been building a chicken coop!

Thanks for stopping by the shop, it’s great to get back to blogging.

Quite a weekend in the Northeast!

We got a little dusting this weekend!

I started the weekend with a private dovetailing lesson (more on that in the next post), when the snow started coming down, and boy did it come down! By the time we were done we had 20″!! We live on a mountain that seems to have it’s own climate. It could be dry in town, and we could be have a blizzard at our house. But in this case, as you know, the Northeast got hit pretty hard witha pre-Halloween storm. Our accumulation is just more than yours!

So my kids played in the snow, my wife sat, curled up reading her ipad and I headed to the shop to get going on the twin cradle. Life is good!

I must admit, this is the most unsupervised milling I’ve done to date. I’ve got a powermatic 8′ Helvetica jointer and a dewalt 735 planer, which I’ve used for small projects, but this was what I bought the powermatic, a serious project with beautiful stock. Enough messing around, it was time to put this machine to the test. I was not disappointed. I was treated to smooth, easy cuts that revealed the beautiful grain and color of the cherry. Awesome.

Rough Cherry from Berkshire Products

A little back story on the jointer and planer. As I starting getting serious about woodworking several years back, I realized, as many do, that this was going to require a little more precision, both from the wood and the tools (and of course me!). You see, wood needs to be dry and square and….well, lets assume you know that if your reading this blog! But seriously, it wasn’t that long ago when things like that were like a light bulb going on in my head. At this point hand tools were still more intimidating than power tools, so I went the power tool route. After doing some research and looking at what I could afford, I decided on a Jet JJP-10BT Planer/Jointer combo. Talk about a deal! I could get BOTH machines in one for around 400 bucks!! Awesome!! It’s a two-fer! Well you know how this story ends. In fairness, the jointer portion worked ok, but the planer really never worked right and switching the machine between the two operations wasn’t a nightmare, but it was just stupid. So I have a $400 collecting sawdust in the basement. Low ball offers are being accepted.

So like all bad relationships I moved on. I saved up and bought the Dewalt 735 on sale at Lowes and when Amazon had a sale on powermatic tools I jumped on it. Of course I had to get their awful credit card, but it was 0% financing for 18 months and 20% off. Such a deal! I can justify anything. As the old adage goes “you get what you pay for”. I saved, I paid for quality and I’m really happy. Both machines did not let me down. It almost seemed like I knew what I was doing!