Replica of a mid-nineteenth century Shaker Cradle

Final glue-up, before finish and touchups. It's basically a dovetailed box, but because each of the sides splay out, it took some time to wrap my head around the layout.

Just wanted to throw this in there - the whole cradle was milled from a single 12/4 cherry slab I had. I broke in my new Laguna bandsaw on this project

Technically the project is very simple, most of the time spent was figuring out how a compound angle dovetail box is put together. This, however, was the easy part. Cut on saw, and shape with rasps.

And once that was figured out, I shot all the edges so that they would be line up nicely. If I make another one of these, first step is going to make a much bigger shooting board.

The sides splayed out at either a 5:1 or 8:1 slope, so here I am planing the complementary slope on the bottom of the boards using a beveled guide on my sliding filister plane.

Next step was to layout the tails on an angled tail board - there are many ways to do this, here is mine. Take your standard dovetail guide and if you lay it on the board, you'll notice one orientation will be near parallel to the bottom of the board. Not only will this not look correct, it will also be weak. So flip the guide over to the non-parallel side and mark as normal.

As you can see here, flipped the tails are sloping correctly.

To find the complementary angle, all you need to do is reference your guide of a line perpendicular to the bottom of the board, like this. Or you can do math, but I find a speed square to be waaaay easier.

Once you get one, use your bevel gauge to transfer the tails to all the boards

I don't normally make knife walls for my dovetails, but because all of these angles are skewed and nothing is square - I found it was well worth the time to make solid kerfs on this projects.

If you do it correctly, you should not be able to tell your tails are on an angle when you look at them. Tranfsering to the pin board is pretty straight forward, the only difference is instead of using a square to bring the pins down to the baseline, you use a bevel guage to keep the pins parallel to your reference edge.

Once it was all put together, I decided to try something new and use drawer slips instead of just grooving the sides. I figured, if anything was going to break on this, it would be the bottom and this is the most repairable options. The bottom is just loose T&G and as it's still the winter, I used nails as spacers so that it has room to expand in the summer months. The wood is poplar - it's saves weight and some money, and will darken to near cherry coloring with time.

And final shot with finish - decided to try something new. Pretty simple finish to use and provides as much protection as something like this will ever need.

The base is simple - two rockers with a tusk tennoned divider holding them together.

I realized about halfway in, that the sides of the box need to be a couple degrees off 90 or else they will be gappy on the inside. People with tablesaws do math - I just had to figure out where to put the sandpaper shim on my shooting board. Here I am with a small test box before I move back to the cradle.