Instead of slats, raised panels for cradle?

[®smpr_fi_mac®]

Jim, your Photobucket account is dead.

Cooler, yup, I read those!

[Admiral]

As a builder of the vintage Woodsmith crib, in which I substituted slats for spindles, I'll throw in my two cents.

I was far more intimidated by the curved and angled, raised panel ends than the slats. The slats were far more time consuming than difficult. I cut a groove in the rails to fit the slats using a router table. It seems like a job you could do with a dado blade, but with the mortises for the stiles, the grove needs to be stopped. The slats can be made by resawing some 4/4 and the spacers between them are just small, square strips. I think Cooler was talking about doing it this way. If you bevel the filler strip just a bit, the seam all but disappears when you plug them in. 

I was just thinking, and my logic may be all wet here, but instead of a dadoed groove, why not just a rabbet on the inside of the rails, then a "dentil" like trim piece with the spacing for the slats, installed over the inside of the open dado.  Seems it would simplify the spacing during assembly.

[Cooler]

I was just thinking, and my logic may be all wet here, but instead of a dadoed groove, why not just a rabbet on the inside of the rails, then a "dentil" like trim piece with the spacing for the slats, installed over the inside of the open dado.  Seems it would simplify the spacing during assembly.

I've seen the dado groove and tenons cut on the ends of slats.  But with small spacers between the slats.  This is quite fast to make.  And if the spacers are well-fitted the joinery is quite convincing as a mortise and tenon.  And in this application, probably just as strong as only the tensile is stressed.  

The shoulders on the slats will hide the ends of the spacers.  If the spacers are made from the same piece of wood it will be very hard to see the lines where the spacer meets the dado-ed piece.

[mr_skittle]

To make it even easier, I'd propose skipping the tenons/shoulders on the slats. Although I can imagine a few ways to make that step pretty easy, I didn't do it at all. I just left the slats as full strips and captured them on the top and bottom as I glued up the frame. There are definitely many different ways to build crib sides but I couldn't be happier with how it turned out with the method I used.