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.