Once I settled on a workable design I had the lumber milled up in a weekend, both ends assembled in another weekend and I’ll likely get it completely assembled and finished in another weekend.

Since this bed is for a teenager not a small child I wanted to beef up the end rails for climbing in and out. I mortised in the end rails, glued them, and put in 4 number 8 wood screws per rail end.

I went with a half box for the end posts for rigidity. I’ve built bunk beds before and a single 2×6 for the end post has been plenty strong enough, but hey, why just build when you can over build.

I put in long rail support blocks, more for ease of assembly than support strength. The blocks give somewhere to set the rails when putting the bed together. The support blocks are glued and screwed to the end posts.

One of the things I was trying to avoid this time was using lag bolts to hold the long rails. Lag bolts are practical, they go in pretty easy, they’re plenty strong, easy to take out for knock down, but they are kind of ugly. I looked at a lot of different knock down hardware and did not find anything that I thought was strong enough or particularly better looking. So given the new theme of actually getting the job done before the kids leave the house I’ll probably go with what I know.

Here’s the sketchup model to date: Loft Bed

I like the tactile quality of a planed surface more so than a sanded surface so the offset and the desired for a planed finish combined to lead me to hand plane the finished top.

Hand planing the top turned out to be a bigger hassle than I anticipated. There was a low spot in the middle along the glue line so more planing was required than I hoped for going in. The grain reverses in multiple places so tear out was a problem. I ended up planing mostly cross grain with a jack to flatten the panel. I followed up with a smoother using a 50 degree blade (pretty high angle) and the smallest mouth opening / cut I could make. I tried heavier cuts and lower angle blades but I would get tear out every time. That was with freshly honed blades sharp enough to shave with.

The result of the high angle blade and the infinitesimal cuts was a surface smooth as glass with no tear out but it took a LOT of passes. I mean a LOT. Here’s one pile of shavings from smoothing one side. You could pick pretty much any one of these shaving and see through it, they were all that fine. I made about three piles of shavings like this and didn’t reduce the thickness of the top or shelf by more than a 32nd. These were a pile of wispy shavings.

Here’s how the shelf looked almost done. You can still see some of the plane marks but most of the tear out was cleaned up by now.

Here’s the top finished.

I had to tune up the panels to get them to fit snug but not too tight. A couple swipes with the shoulder plane and then run around them with a block plane to break the corners.

Pieces milled and cut to size.

Shelf glue up.

Top glue up.

I’ll add some gap on the sides and shrink up the gap on the back. Now that I have my own model I can size it any size I want and print a new set of dimensioned plans as needed.

Even though I have the plans I’m still drawing it up in sketchup.

I like to dry run in sketchup. I find it really makes my shop time go faster and I create fewer errors if I’ve walked through the entire cutting and assembly sequence in sketchup before committing.

If I start with a square block in sketchup the size of the surfaced lumber and then remove geometry similar to how I will do it in the shop I can see the sequence of cutting the lumber once in my head before actually cutting real wood. And then I can dry fit all of the parts in sketchup and see how they fit. I can grab a piece of the model and look at it from any angle before I’ve ever cut it and see fully formed before I ever see it in wood.

Here’s a picture of the start of the model so far. Got the posts and the rails modeled up.

The design calls for mortise and tenon joints throughout.

This is not my design, I dont own the copyrights to it so I wont be posting the actual sketchup model. I’m just drawing it for my own benefit.

The box is made out of 1/2 inch plywood throughout with 1/4 by 3/4 hardwood edging. The similar colored pieces are either identical or mirrors. All of the joinery is either dados for the box or half lap for the edging.

The edging is 1/4 inch thick hardwood edging instead of veneer edge banding. The hardwood will stand up to much more abuse as shoes are thrown in on a daily basis and it will give a small bit of stiffness to the 1/2 inch ply of the box.

I liked the rounded top on the original design but since I’m using 1/4 inch thick edge banding I would need to steam bend the edging to curve around the rounded top. In this case mitered corners serve and are much easier to create.

And again here is the sketchup model to date. I will be adding final dimension and a cutlist and layout.

Here are some initial concepts. Not finished but close. I’m not sure if I want to put some blocking in between the dividers or just go with biscuits or dowels through the shelves and into the dividers.

The locker is around 66 inches high, 12 inches deep, and almost 40 inches wide.

The similar colored pieces are either identical or mirrors. The joinery is being kept simple on purpose to facilitate quick and easy construction.

here’s the sketchup model so far

I watched a video from Wood Magazine where they conducted strength tests on various joints. They concluded that the half lap, finger, and rabbeted joints were the strongest, stronger apparently than a dovetail for a drawer box. And it’s a lot simpler. So it may not be as cool as dovetails but I think it will be more than strong enough and will be quite a bit faster and easier to execute.

Here’s another quick video from Wood Magazine on creating lock rabbet drawers. In this video they say explicitly that their tests show the lock rabbet is stronger than half blind dovetails. This video shows a pretty dirt simple method to setup and cut lock rabbet joints.

The drawers are all the same foot print and only vary in the height. All of the joinery can be cut with a single setup. Basically it’s a series of quarter inch grooves and dados in some half inch material. The joints can be cut on either the table saw with a 1/4 inch dado stack or on the router table with a 1/4 inch bit.

All of the drawer bottoms are identical. All can be cut at the same time with the same setup.