One big problem with our old bed is that it was rickety. The side rails were joined to the headboard and footboard with simple knock-down hardware, and I’m convinced this was the main reason for the bed being flimsy. I set out from the beginning to make this new bed solid as a rock. The rails in the headboard and footboard are joined to the posts with thru mortise and tenon jointery.

Ideally, thru mortise and tenons would be the way to go with the side rails as well. Obviously though, they can’t be glued joints. I could have gone with tusked tenons or folding wedges, but I think those would have looked out of place on this design. Also in order to make such a joint, the tenon has to extend pretty far, so they would have surely resulted in many a-bruised shins and cursing in the middle of the night. At the very least, I wouldn’t be able to put the headboard close to the wall.

In exploring other means to join side rails to head and foot boards, I came across bed bolts. This seemed to me like a strong solution. The only thing I didn’t like about bed bolts, though, was that you have to cover them, usually with decorative brass caps or plugs.

Ultimately, what I came up with was a system that is typically (for me) overbuilt. I used a pair of bolts and cross dowels at every post to join the rails to the head and foot boards. I then covered the hardware with false thru tenons to give the appearance of thru mortise and tenon jointery.

I mortised both sides of each post and put a 2” long stub tenon on each end of the side rails. The outside mortises are centered on the width of the post and 1 ½” wide, 6 ½” high and 1” deep. The mortises that accept the rail tenons are offset slightly to the outsides of the posts. I cut the mortises with a plunge router using jigs that referenced the bottom of each post. I squared off the corners of the mortises with a chisel.

The posts themselves are 4 3/8” square. This leaves a full 1 3/8” of wood between the mortises. The rails are 1 7/8” thick and are dado-ed to 1” deep by 1” wide to accept the rails that the box spring edges rest on. Those rails themselves are 1” x 2” x 80” and have dovetails cut into them for the cross supports (more about this in another blog entry). I put two 1” long x 5/8” dia. cross dowels in each end of each side rail, one through the box spring support rail and one equidistant from the top of the side rail (see the drawing). The cross dowels have 3/8” threads cut through them. I ran 6” long 3/8” bolts through steel plates and slid them through the mortises in the posts into the cross dowels in the rails. Getting the holes drilled accurately for all of this hardware was a bit of a chore.

Once all of the jointery was cut and assembled, it was time to make it pretty. Originally, I tried to make my false thru tenons so that end grain would show. This made sense to me, since if they were actual thru tenons, you would see end grain. Unfortunately, since end grain absorbs and releases moisture more aggressively than long grain, my thru tenons moved around quite a bit. I originally cut them and got them to a decent fit with my hand planes only to find that they didn’t fit the next day. I would trim them again with my hand planes and then stain them, finish them, etc. only to find a week later that they were cupping again and wouldn’t fit their mortises. Finally, I gave up and made my false thru tenons with their end grain at the top and bottom. I just cut them out of the most figured scrap wood I could find so they would still appear like they could be end grain. I made them a fairly loose fit so that if they moved a bit, I could still get them out when it comes time to take the bed apart again. I drilled counterbores in the back of the false thru tenons to clear the bolt heads and epoxied magnet sheets to them so they would hold themselves to the steel plates.

After replacing the 110 V/60 Hz pump in my vacuum press with a 220 V/50 Hz model (thank you, Joe!), I was ready to go. I went to a local cabinet shop and ordered enough 12mm (just shy of ½”) baltic birch ply to do the panels for the bed with plenty left over for jigs and/or the nightstands and dresser.

For the smaller panels, I used simple platens. For the larger panels, I made a dedicated platen with a frame to fit my 4×4 bag, pictured below. You can find directions for making these on Joe’s site.

I cut the veneer with a veneer saw and laid out the pieces in a bookmatch pattern, paying particular attention to the sequence of sheets and arranging them so that they flow from headboard to footboard. A little attention to detail here pays big dividends in the final piece. I won’t get into specifics for the process here, as there are plenty of resources on the net for veneering how-to’s; to include Joe’s site and a few tutorials right here on lumberjocks.

Here is the center footboard panel after it came out of the press and before I removed the veneer tape. Koa side:

Etimoe side:

It’s almost a shame that the etimoe won’t be seen. I feel guilty using such a beautiful veneer as a backer!

I used veneersupplies.com’s Ultra Cat plastic resin glue. This glue has a long open time and consequently a long drying time. When you use a vacuum press, the glue doesn’t dry at all in the press. The press just sets everything in place. If you leave a panel in the press too long, mold can actually form (especially on cherry for some reason) because the glue isn’t drying. Once they come out if the press, it is important to be certain that the panels get even air circulation on both sides. I set them on dowels instead of directly on my bench and I flip them over once or twice during the next 12 hours after they come out of the press.

Here are the panels after the veneer tape is removed and they are dry.

I’ll use my cheap-o block plane to remove the squeeze out from one edge and use that edge as a reference to true up the others and cut the panels down to final size at the wood shop on base. Later on, I’ll scrape and sand these panels and use a little bit of trans-tint dye to alter the color of the koa very slightly (sacrelidge, I know) to better match my design. Of course I’ll do this before my glue up so as not to stain the surrounding walnut (which I’m also darkening a good bit with trans-tint). I’ll post my finishing schedule later on in the project blog.

Up next: how to handle those beastly slabs of maple and

Am I the only one that convinced myself building my own furniture would save money? Maybe I knew all along that isn’t exactly true, but it helps convince the wife that it’s a good idea. Who’s with me?

We all know from experience that this isn’t a cheap hobby. I usually spend more on wood alone – not to mention new tools – than it would cost to buy whatever I’m building. In the end, it’s about the journey and knowing that you’ve built a one-of-a-kind that is hopefully of better quality than you’ll find at any furniture store. I keep all of my receipts from every project just in case I need to file a claim if my furniture is damaged or lost in one of my frequent moves. Frankly, though, I never add them all up at the end of a project for fear of figuring out just how much I really spent. This project will be no exception.

My wife and I have the proverbial “champagne taste on a beer budget.” What that usually means on a project is that I more or less buy the supplies in installments. I’ll order up my veneer, glue, etc and get the plywood substrate when I have enough cash left over from paying the bills. Next paycheck, maybe I can go get some hardwood or order a tool or two that I’ll need.

So the first thing I ordered was the koa veneer. I wanted to snatch up my favorite lot from veneersupplies.com before someone beat me to it. I also ordered some curly etimoe as a backer veneer because Joe had a lot labeled as a “practice lot” for a great price that I couldn’t pass up (damn those champagne tastes). Once that arrived, I went to a local cabinet shop and bought some baltic birch ply and got started on veneering. That process is for another blog entry, though. I guess I never took a picture of all of the veneer before I started making the panels. This is the earliest picture I have:

Right now I’m stationed in Germany. That makes it interesting to get what I want and need. After living here for nearly a year, I finally found a hardwood supplier that won’t turn their nose up at me if I want less than a cubic meter of wood at a time (a cubic meter is about 430 board feet), but has a decent selection of quality kiln-dried lumber. The place is Wickert, in Landau. They are 45 minutes away from my home, but the drive to get over there is beautiful. I go through their equivalent of a national forest on some narrow winding roads that for the most part aren’t even lined. The drive back with my little SUV overloaded with lumber is another story. Those winding roads can be nerve-wracking!

As you can imagine, American black walnut is not as affordable over here as it is in the states – let alone in California. All things considered (to include how weak the dollar is compared to the euro) I paid something on the order of $11 per board foot for 10/4 walnut. Another thing is that the lumber is milled differently here than in the states. They saw a tree through-and-through (flat sawn) and sell the boles directly to you with natural edges and without sawing out the pith. So I paid over $11/b.f. for the pith and sapwood as well. They are stacked in the same order as they came off the tree. This makes grain and color matching a non-issue, so long as you can afford to buy all that you need and fit it in your car in one trip. The problem is that the wastage factor when buying lumber this way is considerably higher. For an example, all of the walnut pictured below was not even enough for the bed alone (there are three 10/4 slabs and two 8/4 slabs). I had to go back for two more 10/4 slabs.

Like I said, I’m afraid to add up the receipts!

You can also see the curly maple I bought from the same supplier (on a different trip) in the picture above. That was a major score. This hardwood supplier has three buildings about the size of aircraft hangars that are full of mostly hardwoods. The place is HUGE. The place is organized more or less by species. If they get any figured wood, they will sell that to instrument makers or specialty suppliers at a premium. Even if I could find one of those suppliers or instrument makers, they wouldn’t even talk to me – not just because of the language barrier either.

On my first trip to Wickert, I was planning on buying my walnut or a cheaper substitute, like chechen (no luck there). While I was waiting for their English-speaking employee to show up, I was wandering around the warehouse (actually more or less just huge open air pavilions) and I found the maple. The 10/4 maple boles were 18 feet long and stacked at least 15 feet high. At about eye level, I saw a couple of boards that were a little rippled where the bark had fallen away. This is a telltale sign that it’s probably curly. These were the only few boards I could see with those signs in the entire place – one tree in maybe 30 in that stack and the stack next to it. When the salesman got there, and as we were walking around trying to find chechen (he didn’t know what I was talking about) I asked him where the figured maple was, and he told me about how they do business (no figured woods there). Right then I decided that I was taking home that curly maple that day instead of my walnut or chechen.

I showed him the two boards I wanted and he immediately groaned and mumbled something in German – probably something unfavorable about what a pain in the butt American hobbyists are. The boards were, after all, buried halfway down the stack. He argued with me that just because the board is rippled on the outside it doesn’t necessarily mean you have curly maple. I agreed (not wholeheartedly) and told him that if they weren’t curly I would buy four instead of two just to make it worth his while to dig them out for me. Hopefully the two boards I bought will be enough to get my nightstands and dresser done as well. I’m pretty sure they will be.

The Quest for Purpleheart:

I asked the guy at Wickert about purpleheart as well and got nothing but a blank stare. I showed him purpleheart in my copy of “The Real Wood Bible” and he told me he had never seen such a wood before. I also asked at the cabinet shop where I get my plywood. I got pretty much the same response. I finally gave up and ordered 10 board feet of 8/4 purpleheart from a hardwood supplier I used to use all the time when I lived in the Baltimore/D.C. area. Shipping wasn’t cheap, but what else was I going to do? When the purpleheart arrived, I was TDY in Garmisch, Germany for some training. I had been talking to the German guy that runs the woodshop on the army post there and had asked him about purpleheart. Germans have never heard of the stuff. I guess that’s not too surprising since its origins are South America. I had my wife cut off a small piece and bring it down to me when she came to visit. I was curious if it had any figure, so I wanted to take it over to the wood shop and plane off a bit of the roughness to get a look. When the German craftsman saw it, it blew his mind. Once I had seen what I wanted to see, I gave it to him. I’m not going to use all of it, and this was only a 5×5” piece. You would think I gave him a piece of Noah’s Ark or something.

Here’s the kicker. When I went to the woodshop on base where I do all of my milling (left my big tools in storage when I moved here from the ‘states) there was a guy there with loads of purpleheart. He got it FREE at an army garrison 3 hours from here. It seems that one of the deploying units there was stripping it from the beds of their big trucks because it’s just too heavy. There is apparently hundreds and hundreds of board feet there just wasting away, but you have to be in the right career field to even have access to this installation. He offered to take me along on his next trip and all I would have to do is help him cut it up into small enough pieces to fit into his truck. I would get half of the haul when we got back here. I gave him my phone number. Even though I have all the purpleheart I need for this project, how could I turn down more for FREE? That was months ago. I asked about him at the wood shop the other day. He has now retired and moved back to the states. I never heard from him.

Part 2: Design Evolution

As the years passed and I got closer to the actual build, I was constantly reevaluating the design in my head and talking to my wife once in awhile about my thoughts. She is the best kind of customer in that she gives me a fair amount of freedom with my designs. If I ever go into business as a woodworker, I know they won’t all be that way.

My design evolved because I kept looking at other beds and seeing elements I liked more than what I had on paper and in my head. Here are a few examples:

From this bed, I like the fact that it looks solid as a rock. I dig the frame and panel headboard, too. I don’t really care for the upside-down curves in the footboard and side rails, though. And I’m on the fence about the accents in the footboard posts. Overall, I would like the bed to be more symmetrical with all of the posts having the accents or none at all and I would like the footboard to look similar to the headboard.

From this bed, I like the inlay in the headboard and footboard. Ultimately in the end I chose not to do any inlay in my bed though. More about that decision later.

Now we’re getting somewhere. I like the look of figured wood panels and contrasting frames. I’m also liking the look of thru tenons. This is a good looking bed, but to me the headboard is a little too plain even with the figured panels and I would like it to be more stout.

Hey! I like those post feet and caps. I’ll be stealing those :) I might rework the cap a little, but they’re definitely looking good!

How many people can say they’ve seen something on “The Sopranos” and thought, “Hey, that’s a GREAT idea!”? How many of those people have never been in prison? I saw this headboard in an episode at the beginning of season 6 and immediately searched for a screen capture from the episode to get the curved crest element with those slats in groups of 3.

When I found sketchup, I started melding all of these ideas into an entirely new design. When it was all hashed out, it turned out to be a long way from my original. The original idea I had in my head was a canopy bed incorporating a good amount of wrought iron into a cherry and maple bed. Here is what I wound up with, though:

I’m using curly koa veneer for the panels, walnut for most everything else and maple and purpleheart as accent woods. I selected koa because we spent three years living in Hawaii (I’m in the Air Force) and it will remind us of that period in our lives. American black walnut is grown quite a bit in California, and it will remind me, at least of the two years we spent living in Monterey. I chose to accent with maple and purpleheart just because I like they way it looks :) I kicked around the idea of inlaying some birds of paradise or orchids in the headboard and beach grass in the footboard. Ultimately, though, I decided that would look too busy and maybe even detract from the figure of the koa.

I also designed companion pieces to the bed, and will start building them once the bed is complete. Here’s a sketchup drawing of the entire bedroom suite:

Up next – time to start laying out the cash. Stay tuned!

Part 1: The Idea is Born

The first part of my process for building any furniture for my own home is by far the longest. I have had designs floating around in my head for five years on this bed – just refining them here and there – once in awhile even sketching them on paper and stowing them away in a folder.

My wife and I bought the cheapest king-size bed we could find at JC Penny when we got married nearly 12 years ago now, long before I even thought about woodworking. It’s made out of pine in a quazi-mission style with the cheapest hardware they could have used. It’s rickety as can be. Since we were living in Monterey at the time, it is a California king. It has always been a hassle trying to find bedding. Through the years, two puppies have snacked on parts of the footboard and side rails. It has served us well, but needless to say, we’ve wanted to replace it for quite some time.

We knew what a bed needed to be to meet our demands. It had to be a standard king size and sturdy. Outside of those two criteria, the design palette was blank.

At first we thought we knew what we wanted. My wife suggested a canopy bed, and I liked the idea enough to agree. I wanted to incorporate some wrought iron into the headboard and footboard, and a wrought iron frame for the canopy fabric would work well, too. The first design I had worked out in my head and on paper called for cherry posts, side rails and headboard/footboard crest rails and maple for the rest with wrought iron vertical bars on 4-inch spacing across the head and footboards. The bars would be mortised into maple cross beams in the headboard/footboard with the top one having a concave curve. I would put a half twist in each bar about three inches from the top with their location following the curve of the top cross beam. I can’t even find those sketches anymore or I would scan them and post them with this blog. Hopefully my description is enough to give you the idea. Of course I had companion pieces in mind to go with the bed. I had a dresser, armoire and nightstands roughly sketched.

It’s funny how our tastes have changed. To be honest, I was never completely happy with what I was coming up with in the first few years. I was afraid when it was all done, it would look too primitive/medieval-inspired with all of the iron. Our tastes are more traditional and even contemporary-leaning. Check out part 2 to see what I came up with and how. I promise there will be pictures 