PASHions
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In this edition, Louis M. Pelus, PhD, discusses woodworking and his recent labor of love: building a crib
for his grandson. Dr. Pelus is professor of microbiology and immunology in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at Indiana University School
of Medicine in Indianapolis, Indiana.
Sawdust Memories
Louis M. Pelus, PhD
When did your interest in woodworking start?
The toys I grew up with are much different than what kids have today. I loved Tinker
Toys and Lincoln Logs and building with wood – there were no electronics involved. I
would look at a pile of wood scraps and say to myself, “What can I make with it?”
When I was 8 or 9 years old, I took apart my grandfather’s wooden crates to build
something new. Give me a hammer, a saw, and some nails, and I could sit for hours
building pyramids and forts – whatever I could think of.
Describe some of your woodworking projects, leading up to your special project.
I started out wanting to make picture frames. Doing something like that sounds simple,
but you need a lot of tools. I needed a table saw to be able to trim the boards down, a
router and routing table to make different moldings and designs, a miter saw to cut
angles, and so forth. Needless to say, I’ve had to accumulate a lot of power tools.
I lucked out when I met my wife. She worked for a major national tool manufacturer
at the time, so I was able to buy some high-end carpentry tools at a very significant
employee discount. (That’s just one of the reasons I lucked out, of course.)
I was always interested in carpentry and fixing things around the house – refinishing doors, making new wall trims, building decks. … This really escalated when my wife
and I purchased a house that was built almost 100 years ago. I’ve been rehabbing “this
old house” ever since. We blew out walls and put in new doors and windows, so I had
to figure out where to get moldings to match. I couldn’t find them in salvage yards, so I
decided to make them, which amounted to 400 feet of complex moldings!
By then, it was getting to be really fun, so I made some small pieces of furniture,
like end tables, a console table, a dresser, and bookshelves. My interests kept evolving
until I eventually made this crib.
What was the most challenging aspect of building the crib?
The hardest part wasn’t building the crib – it was, designing it! The design was based off
of a crib that my son and his wife saw in an online catalog, so I didn’t actually have the
plans for it, just a basic size spec sheet. It took me about three months just to come up
with a measured plan and a cutting diagram to be able to start working on it. I used
PowerPoint – not necessarily the correct program to do this type of project, but I managed!
It took about as much time to finish it as it did to design it. The cutting and building
were the easiest parts; I had all of the wood cut in one weekend and the crib built in
another two weekends.
With a crib, there are so many other aspects to consider. Most importantly, it had to
be safe and meet the federal guidelines for spacing, materials, and construction. Then, I
had to create the moveable mattress platform in the crib so that it could grow with him,
which proved to be quite tricky.
I also wanted to make a piece of furniture, not a giant box, so it took a lot of internet
research and YouTube tutorials – watching to see how other woodworkers had solved
some of the challenges I was coming across. Lastly, I’m working in Indiana and my son
lives in Philadelphia, so I had to design the crib to be dismantled and shipped.
And woodworking is not just working with wood but also finishing it. A piece of
wood can look great, but it doesn’t show its true potential until it’s stained or varnished the correct way. The piece isn’t finished until it’s finished! The wood has its
unique characteristics and grain. I finished the crib entirely by hand, with seven coats of
urethane, and sanding between the coats. There’s still an educational deficiency on my
part, so I’m looking to learn more about how to finish wood.
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ASH Clinical News
The beginning of the
project: collecting lumber and learning new
joinery techniques.
July 2016