I make this little base for the finials to rest on. I add glue to the four little triangles and tape them together and set aside to dry.

I form blocks of wood…

Make a jig for my table saw which helps me knock the corners off the blocks. I make extras and select the four best finials.

Using a forstner bit in my drill press, I drill out holes for a tenon.

Here, the finials are installed and I get ready for one final step in construction.

I add pegs to the post mortise and tenon joints using a drill guide and cut them flush with a pull saw.

The finish process on this pine is a coat of Charles Neil’s pre-stain conditioner, Minwax oil stain and then a combination of two coats of brush on poly and a final coat of wipe on poly. Here is the finished project:

The bed was donated a couple of weeks ago to a family who had their home destroyed in the April 27th tornado event which struck north Alabama. The family is now living in a new home and this bed along with many furniture donations by others are helping them get their lives back together. This was a fun and very rewarding project to build and I plan to construct more disaster related projects in the future.

Thanks for reading,

Jeff

http://www.woodfever.net

The pine boards glued together, cut to length with the addition of an oak cleat along the bottom of each side rail.

This is creative woodworking at its best. I take a rail and stand it on its end and bungee cord it to our basement stair railing. I clamp a template to the rail and cut a mortise for the hardware. This operation encroaches on the wife’s part of the basement. Note in the background, I use towels to protect some of her stuff from the sawdust.

After a little chisel work, I get a nice snug fit for the hardware.

With the hardware fit confirmed, I use a forstner bit and drill holes on the inside end of each rail to receive oak dowels. The hardware is held in place with three two inch screws driven through the oak dowels.

The hardware successfully installed on the side rails.

Using the same template with just a minor adjustment I route out a mortise for the post hardware.

The post hardware successfully installed.

With all this completed, I can for the first time set the bed up.

I still have to form the finials and finish the stain and poly, so a lot left to do, but the bed is coming together nicely.

Someone asked me, “Why do you call it the Tornado Bed?” This project is being donated to a family in Sipsey, Alabama whose home was destroyed in the historic April 27th tornado outbreak.

Thanks for reading,

Jeff

With the foot board completed, it was time to move to the more complex head board. Since my projects are typically the sloooowww moving variety, the bed is designed to be simple, but to have a few visually interesting features. One of which is the head board panel. Here is a view of the bed…

Since I had already fabricated the posts for the head board, I needed to form the lower cross rail and the panel. Each component is a glue up of two 1x select pine from the home center.

A photo of all the components of the headboard glued-up, and rough cut to size.

Tenons are cut to fit the previously formed mortises in the posts.

Vertical parts of the panel use stub tenon joinery and the left and right ends slip into the posts.

A dry fit of the panel system. Note the grain flows from one panel to the next.

I pre-stain and finish the panel system and glue it all together. One note, for the first time, I used Charles Neil’s pre-stain conditioner for blotch control on the pine. It works very well.

I then glue all of the head board components together.

The head board and foot board about 85% complete.

I am currently working on the side rails and the mortises for the bed hardware. I hope to have it completed by the end of September.

Thanks for looking,

Jeff
http://www.woodfever.net

As the relief effort got underway, I contemplated how I could help. While the community I live in escaped serious damage, this day was life changing for several of my friends. When something like this happens so close to home, the idea of doing nothing or very little left an uneasy feeling in me. I have a chronic back problem, so heavy lifting and debris removal in damaged areas would have to be left to others. Since I have made woodworking my hobby for almost 30 years, I decided I would build a queen size bed and give it to a needy family. I am currently about 2/3 through with the project. This is my first blog post at LumberJocks and here is the progress so far…



Straight forward design – a little style gained from the headboard panels and finials.



A close up of the finials.


Primarily for convenience and budget reasons, I chose select grade pine for the project and I designed the posts so they could be quickly made.











With the posts complete, I form the cross pieces for the footboard first adding tenons to the ends.








I have worked on this project on and off for two months and currently am about half way through the headboard. I’ll add a post about that next.

Jeff
http://www.woodfever.net