The Trestle Starts to Come Together

On my last post, we got got caught up to the previous post.  Now that the legs were out of the glue forms and I'd managed to clean them up and bleed all over them.  It was time to go back to a  little designing.  I needed to figure out how I was gonna get them to be functional as the trestle ends.  Because of the curves in the bottom of the legs, I wanted a fairly smooth transition and ended up designing a Walnut gusset that would solidify the curve and add a good amount of strength.  Then figure out how I was going to make and install it.   What I did was simply lay the legs out on the rather crude drawing I'd made and took measurements.  I chose where the on the legs the curve would start and end and played with my compass until I had the radius dialed in.   I used a piece of plywood to make a template of the overall shape.

After using the bandsaw to cut out the basic shape, I used double stick tape to attach the cut out Walnut and proceeded to flush trim the pieces on my router table.  OK!! STOP RIGHT THERE!!!!  I was being stupid.  Trying to shape a piece such as this using just a piece of plywood was asking for a flying projectile!  What I should have done was make a sled to use on the router table.  I will next time.  This was a scary thing to do.  If something is scary...it's not something you should be doing.  Bad things can happen.   Again, although I didn't use a sled with hold downs, I will next time.  But, now I used a rabbeting bit to put a tongue on the curved sides and a dado along the top to house the panel I'd be making later.  I settled on approximately a 5/8 inch for the tongue and dado (measurements are fuzzy because I was building mostly in relative dimensioning).  Unfortunately, I never took a photo of the gussets by themselves.  All the dadoes in the leg were done with a rabbeting plane and the gussets were fit with a rather large spokeshave.  I fell in love with the spokeshave.  I'm getting more!!

The fitting of the gussets was done by marking the high spot where the gusset shoulder hit the legs with a Pentel Sunburst Med Gel pen and shaving it off until the leg and gusset shoulder came together.  Once I had the fit as close to perfect as I could, I could put them together and get the measurement for the Elm panels.  This was the one element that actually pulls the legs and the trestle together.  The curves somewhat do but, as I'll make clearer in a future post, they really don't because they aren't the same radii of the cradle curves.  This is the first glimpse I get of what the Elm panel will look like.

Again, I don't have any photos of the panel itself.  But, after the panel was cut and fit, it was time to start designing the top of the trestle and how I was to do the stretcher(s).  Before doing the mortises on the cradle, I had sketched this to be the rocking/locking mechanism. 

From this I drew all the shapes on the wood and cut it out on the bandsaw and faired it with the oscillating spindler sander.

Once I had the layout, it was time to fire up the Woodrat again and make the slots in the top of the legs to house the cap.

You can see the jig for doing this is just thrown together out of scraps.  As long as I could hold the trestle in place, I could use this to get it to the perfect depth.  I then moved on to the caps.  I used a forstner bit on the drill press to hog out the majority of the material.  

The rest was done with hand tools.  At this point, I'm really finding the most enjoyable part of all this is the hand work.  I can never see myself building anything without using power tools, but I do love the parts of the build that can best be done by hand.

Here are the finished caps.

Now it was just a matter of getting a good fit of the caps to the trestle legs.  It was starting to look good to me.

After this fitting I was able to drill the holes for the hinge pins.  In the next post I'll finish the cradle and get a finish on it.  

Thanks for stopping by to follow this build.  It was a pleasure, and I appreciate being able to share the experience.  Please ask any question or comment on anything you may find interesting.

Whoa there, big guy!

It seems I've jumped too far forward.  The last post was about the bent lamination for the trestle stand of Gretchin's Cradle.  That wasn't started until after I'd gotten to the point of dry fitting the actual cradle itself.  
I think in an earlier post I mentioned that the design was somewhat dictated by the material.  I had the sides from a beautiful crotch Elm board  
      
and the headboard and footboard were from another piece of very figured flame Elm.

  






The problem was that I was originally wanting the side of the cradle to be at 5 degrees and I couldn't get both the headboard and footboard  out of the panel and still keep the 5 degrees.  So, I had to go down to 3 degrees.  It may not seem like it would be much, but I'm stubborn and once I see something in my minds eye, that's what I want to produce.  I performed this operation on my Excalibur sliding table.  It's a nice piece of equipment.  Not as nice as having a true panel saw, but much more in my budget.

Luckily the final product didn't look as bad as I feared.  After cutting the headboard and footboard from the panel, I used my Woodrat to make the box joints.  

I was purposefully making them proud by about 1/8 inch to allow a crisp bevel to the ends of the protrusions.  This is somewhat mimicking and tweaking the Green and Green style box joints.
Once the joints were cut and I finessed them to the fit I wanted I did my first dry fit.  

I laid out the placement of the mortises for the rocker tenons.  These were done as a wedged tenon, which will keep the joint from ever failing.  In this photo you can see that the mortise is angled to allow a wedge to be inserted at a later time.  

It just wouldn't be good to have the old nursery rhyme come true.  Down would come cradle, baby and all.   Gretchin would probably beat me up!  

Well, that at least catches up to the end of the last post.  The next post focuses on more hand work, which is what ultimately sets a nice piece from a standard build.  Hand work allows you to dial in perfection, or as close as one can get.