Making an Adjustable Height Walnut and Maple Baby Crib

Hey everyone, I’m here with my son JR and my wife Lindsay. Welcome to JR’s nursery!

In this post, I’m going to show you how I made this walnut and maple crib. The frame parts are all made from walnut, and the spindles are made from maple. The frame rises from the front to the back, so the side is inclined, and the spindles themselves are tapered from the center out to their ends. The crib can also disassemble, because the front and the back rails are pinned to the legs with brass rods. The height of the mattress can also be lowered as the baby gets older. So let’s go back to the beginning!

I just laid out the rails and these two boards are bookmatched, meaning they were sequentially cut from the same log. They have some nice, straight, even grain, which is exactly what I’m looking for. I already laid these out and got the lower and the upper rails marked for the entire thing. 

I’ll start the milling process by ripping the rail stock out of the boards. I labeled the end of each pair so I can keep them together as a pair. I also removed the inch or so of waste from each board to get them closer to their final width. For the leg stock, you might remember the slab of walnut that I used to make the bassinet. I ended up with a perfectly-sized off-cut to get the stock for both the legs. By having the legs come out of one block, I was able to have bookmatched leg stock. It’s a subtle detail, but just like the rails, I like subtleties. 

I left the roughly-ripped stock for a few days to de-stress before milling them flat into thickness. The boards for the rails ended up being very stable. After sitting around for about a week after their initial milling, they hadn’t moved. So instead of milling them down thinner, I left them at their current thickness of around 7/8 of an inch thick. The legs needed a little bit of work, and those ended up at 1 3/4 inches thick. I ripped all the lower rails to 5 1/2 inches wide, and the upper rails at 3 1/2 inches wide. I also ripped the legs at 3 1/2 inches wide. The front legs are cut to 36 inches long and the rear legs are cut to 42 inches long. 

I’m going to start with the side assembly joinery. So I cut the lower side rails to length. The upper rails are angled, so I’ll cut them to length as I work through the joinery. I made the shoulder cuts for the tenons on the ends of the lower rails. And then to help me set up to figure out the upper rail, I removed some material from the tenon area to create a rabbet. 

That rabbet allows me to set the lower rail between the legs, which gives me the actual distance that the legs will be apart. Now I can set the upper rail exactly into position and copy the exact angle that the upper rail’s shoulder will need to be cut to. I cut that angle on one end, and then I can start to lay out the angled tenon. 

I come over one inch from the end, and using my bevel gauge, strike the shoulder line. Then I’ll carry the line across the edges with a square, and switch back to the bevel gauge to complete this shoulder line on the other face. 

Before I start cutting the tenons, I cut the mortises in the legs. These mortises are a half inch wide. 

To start forming my tenons, I use an off-cut from the rails to set the height of the dado stack. I shoot for something that’s just a little tight, so I can finesse it later. For the upper rails, I swing the miter gauge to roughly the correct angle, and make the cuts, staying a little away from my scribe shoulder line, which I then chop back to at the bench with my chisels. 

Now, to get the perfect shoulder-to-shoulder length, I place the upper rail between the legs, again referencing off one completed shoulder. I’ll cut this one to length, and lay out and cut the tenon the same way as I did on the other end of this rail. I then finish fitting the tenons to the mortises in the side assemblies. Before moving on to the long rails, I fill a few defects with some epoxy and tint. I cut the tenons slightly oversize with the dado stack. A couple of clean-up passes with the shoulder plane makes them fit perfectly to the mortise. Next, I’ll do a little clean-up work at the base of the shoulder, and then cut the tenon to length. 

The last detail on the frame is to add a taper to the bottom of the legs. These don’t have to be perfectly identical, so I just follow the line at the band saw and clean them up with a hand plane. 

Now onto the spindles. I grabbed these maple boards and laid out the two different lengths that I’m going to need. I rough-cut them to length, jointed them flat, and planed them to thickness. I ended up at a finished thickness of 15/16 of an inch. 

Next, I go through and rip all the boards into square stock for the spindles. The finished crib is going to require 50 spindles, and I made about 56 spindle blanks just in case. To create consistently tapered spindles, I’m going to use a router and a jig on my lathe. 

Creating the spindles was pretty mindless, I just had to run the router back and forth. The hardest part about this was finding a good lathe speed, cut depth, and feed speed that would produce the smoothest cut without the router bit catching or tearing a chunk out of the spindle. I found that running the lathe at 1400 RPM, taking shallow passes, while moving the router slowly towards the ends worked best, until the last spindle that I accidentally ran the lathe in reverse, which dramatically improved the cut quality. 

Here’s what the spindles look like after the routing. The router leaves a textured surface and the center isn’t completely round yet. I cleaned up the surface and brought the spindle to its final diameter with 60 grit sandpaper. I’ll start working up the grits, but before I move on, I spend a moment sanding with the grain. So now onto 80, 120, 150, and lastly, 180 grit sandpaper. 

Now back to the rails to lay out and drill the holes for the spindles. The side rails are a little more interesting than the front and back rails, since the upper rail is angled. I used a marking gauge to grab a center line and used a pair of dividers to divide out the edge of the lower rail so that the space between each spindle is the same, including the space between the last spindles and the legs. To transfer the hole locations to the upper rail, I butt the shoulders of both rails up against a straight edge. So they are in the same orientation they would be when attached to the legs, just closer together. I can then use a square to transfer the hole locations to the upper rails. And I’ll transfer the locations from the face to the edge. 

To drill the holes in the upper rail, I use a bevel gauge to transfer the angles to the drill press. Then I can just go down the line and drill all the holes. 

Next, I’ll be working on getting the spindles to the correct length, since they get shorter as they move towards the front of the side assembly. I’ll use a caliper to find the point on the spindle that’s a half inch, and I’ll mark a quarter inch down from that point. This is where I’ll make one of the cuts. I made a story stick to mark the total length of each spindle in the assembly. Now after I cut this end, the spindle diameter is going to be more than a half an inch. So I use my dowel plate to form a half-inch tenon on that end of the spindle. The front and back assemblies are far less exciting, because everything there is square. 

Now I can get ready to start applying the finish. So I take the assembled crib apart. As I’m removing the spindles, I number them, so I can put them back in the same order. The order on the front and back really shouldn’t matter, but who knows. 

Next I’ll lay out the holes that will receive the brass rod which will pin the tenons and allow me to disassemble the crib for storage. And I just drilled these all the way through with a 3/8 inch Forstner bit. Then I can do a final sanding on all the frame parts and break all the edges and corners. 

For the finish on the frame, I’m using salad bowl finish. Putting the tenons up on blocks allows me to easily apply finish to all sides. And then I can do the legs. I’ve put on three coats of finish, sanding between the coats with 600 grit sandpaper. 

For the spindles, I’m using a water-based poly in a spray can. I went with a water-based finish for these to keep the maple as white as possible. Unfortunately, this finish ended up yellowing quite a bit despite looking all right on my sample piece. These spindles were easy to spray by using some blocks of wood with holes drilled in them to hold the spindles. I applied two coats of finish to the spindles, sanding between each coat with 600 grit sandpaper. 

The mattress frame is going to primarily consist of two beams that will span the inside of the legs. I made these from a piece of 6/4 walnut. I jointed and planed them, and left them as thick as possible. And before moving on, I wanted to test their strength. Looks like each beam can support my body at the center of their span, so a pair of them will be plenty to hold whatever parent wants to be hanging out in the crib with their child. 

The pins that will allow the crib to be disassembled are going to be made from a 3/4 inch brass rod. I made a simple jig to hold the rod while it’s being cut at the bandsaw. This is just a hole drilled in the off-cut from tapering the legs. And that gives me a reference for the thickness of the legs. 

I’ll clean up the saw marks and polish the pins with a buffing wheel. I’m starting the buffing with a cutting compound, now I’ll remove the saw marks and also run over the edges so that it’ll go into the holes easier, and it will also hide the fact that they are not flush with the surface of the legs. To further polish the surface, I switch to a polishing compound and go over the ends again. 

Next, I’ll glue up the side assemblies. All these assemblies were a little goofy to get together, because of trying to get all these spindles and holes lined up. To get clamping pressure across the angled rail, I used a pair of angled blocks. Normally I temporarily glue these on, but since I pre-finished the legs, that wasn’t an option. So they just kind of slid around as I applied pressure. So a clamp from the top to bottom of the front leg kept that wedge from sliding up and down, and blocks of wood against the lower clamp keeps the other wedge from sliding down. 

Now I can start putting the front and back assemblies together, and bring them into the house for their final assembly. These could be a little tricky to get together. I found that working from one side to the other, with the help of a clamp, was the easiest way to go. 

Next I can work on installing the pins. I clamped across the rails, so the shoulders should be as tight as possible, and drilled the 3/8 inch hole through the tenons, and then I could tap the pins into place. 

Next, I’ll install the mattress support rails. I used a spacer, referencing off of the bottom of the leg so the rails would be level. I transferred the hole location with a Forstner bit since it has a center point and I couldn’t find my 3/8 inch Brad point bit. I’m going to be tapping these holes for a 3/8 inch socket cap screw. So I drill the hole with the appropriate sized hole for the tap I’m going to use. And I use a block of wood to help me keep the bit square as I’m drilling. Next, I’ll run the tap down the hole. Tapping wood is really easy with a drill. I just run the drill really slowly. To help strengthen the threads a bit, I dropped some CA glue down the sides of the hole. And the same process with the upper position. I just did two positions for the mattress height for now. I figure if we need an intermediate height, I can always add some more holes in the future. 

After I got these bolted on, I gave them another strength test. The final thing I did was cut and install some boards that would span the rails to support the mattress. Pretty strong. 

I’m really happy with the way this turned out. And I’m really happy with the subtleties in the wood. I know it’s something that most people won’t notice, but I know it’s there, so of course I like that part. This project actually took me a lot longer than I had anticipated it would take me. And that was really just those spindles. The frame went together really quickly, just mortises and tenons, but the spindles really slowed me down. Just because there are so many of them and it took so much time each. But I’m happy I’m done with it, and I’m not going to make a crib ever again hopefully. So the reason that I pegged the front and the back is so that the upper and lower rails as well as the spindles can be taken apart as one unit and converted into a bed if you really wanted to. All you have to do is add some new posts or some new legs to the bed and then you won’t have to worry about these big mortises in the top of the legs if you had picked it the other way and wanted to use the whole back assembly and front assembly as a headboard and footboard. This is the last project for my nursery series. I previously did a video on making his changing table, which was just a small dresser, and I also made his rocking bassinet. 

So thank you as always for watching, I greatly appreciate it, and so does he. If you have any questions or comments about anything I showed today with the build or anything back down in my shop, please feel free to leave me a comment. As always, I’d be happy to answer any questions you might have. And till next time, happy woodworking!