Arched Bed #11: Breaking Down the Break Down Joints

So I’ve broken down the break down steps into a mini-series or blog within a blog. Since the side rails need to be the exact width as the footboard it only made sense to use the foot board to layout the joints. I centered the footboard on the posts and used a 4” scrap to make sure both sides were the same distance from the bottom and drew a line around the rail.

This next shot is a little out of order but I used various rulers, squares, and templates to line up the holes. As it turned out all I needed was to find the centerline of the middle hole, the hole that lines up the connector. The other two holes are defined by the jig.

Each of the four joints has three matching holes. The center hole is for the connector. The top and bottom holes are for the pins. I used 1/4” steel rod and 1” long metal spacers. The ID of the spacers is slightly larger than 1/4”, very slight. And the OD of the spacers is just under 3/8” so this means I could drill three 3/8” diameter holes on the headboard posts, three 1/4” holes on each end of the two side rails, and two 1/4” holes on the footboard. The footboard only needed two because I had already cut the channel for the connector bolt. I made a 3/8” middle hole in the headboard post to give the 1/4” diameter connector some wiggle room on that side of the joint.

Like I said in the previous blog, it turned out to be much easier than you would expect and due to the length of this entry I’ll go through that ‘drill’ in the next blog.

-- tim hill www.newcalshop.com