Another Bed Thread

[ian]

Thanks for your input Ian. I was thinking of using the router along the long edge of the tenon and doing the short edge by hand.

Another suggestion I had today was to use a biscuit join instead.

biscuits would work, sort of, but there's a lot of side-to-side slop with biscuit joints, and aligning the slats and rails could be a challenge if your biscuit cutter doesn't hold its settings

IMO hand cut tenons are the easiest. Do the angled end first and if you cut your slats over length you will have room for the odd mistake

[Stiebs]

Work started on the weekend, and so far I'm pretty happy with the progress, despite one minor boo-boo and one major forehead slap moment.

Once again, need to give kudos to the guys at Shiver-Me-Timbers. They cut and thicknessed all my bits and pieces - about 8 different stock sizes all up, and only complained a little bit.

I've decided to go with posture slats instead of making my own. But I will put in one support slat half way up the length of the bed to counter any bowing.

So here are a couple of pictures of the progress so far (which so far is pretty much the mortises in the four posts and the tenons for the cross beams.

First up, I scored around the tenon cuts to stop splintering from the router.

Second pic, one tenon complete.

Third pic, just to show you don't need a workshop kitted up to the nines for woodworking. All timber cut to length using the compound saw you can see under the bench, and routing down on the Kreg benchtop router table. Dust extraction courtesy of a cheapo Ozito shop vac.

Fourth pic, one of the mortises half complete. It is extremely close to the edge, and when chiselling out, a couple of them did crack - I wasn't too concerned, as that will be covered up later anyway. In hindsight, I probably should've run the mortise all the way to the edge anyway.

Fifth picture - my forehead slap moment. No matter how many times you measure, it doesn't matter if you're measuring the wrong thing , The mortises in the longer head posts should have been measured from the bottom of the posts, not made equidistant to the footer posts. Solution - get a piece from the offcuts and size it to fill in the hole. Grrr.

[ian]

Work started on the weekend, and so far I'm pretty happy with the progress...

snip

So here are a couple of pictures of the progress so far (which so far is pretty much the mortises in the four posts and the tenons for the cross beams.

Hi Mark

May I suggest you plane or sand your timber to remove the machining marks before you go much further
doing so will make the final finishing soo much easier DAMHIKT

Fifth picture - my forehead slap moment. No matter how many times you measure, it doesn't matter if you're measuring the wrong thing , The mortises in the longer head posts should have been measured from the bottom of the posts, not made equidistant to the footer posts. Solution - get a piece from the offcuts and size it to fill in the hole. Grrr.

good recovery

[Stiebs]

Hi Mark
May I suggest you plane or sand your timber to remove the machining marks before you go much further
doing so will make the final finishing soo much easier

That's the plan. I'll measure and cut (hopefully with no stupid mistakes!) the mortises for the vertical slats then plane and sand all the pieces before gluing. And somewhere in there before sanding, fill up a couple of holes with some resin.

[ian]

I'm thinking that the dimensions of your timber will change somewhat with the sanding, possibly making the vertical slats, in particular, too short.

[Stiebs]

Good point. Looks like I got some evenings of sanding coming up...

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[Stiebs]

Quick update.

Thanks for your help and suggestions so far everyone. Progress is slow but steady, and I've taken a few more pics this evening. The foot end is getting there. All pieces as shown are sanded down to 180 grit, but a few pieces need a little more work. As per your suggestion Ian, I've concentrated on the edges where the thickness matters.

I've just dry assembled the foot end so far, and I'm happy to say that all the joints fit nice and snugly with none of the slats rattling, and the whole thing needs a few taps with a mallet to pull it apart again.

I'm yet to cut and edge the piece that fits along the top edge - the saw and router work needs to wait for the weekends, lest I upset the neighbours in the evenings

First pic is all the bits so far for the foot end.

Second pic is a view of 18 of the 36 mortises for the vertical slats (The other 18 are on the head end) and 4 of the 10 mortises on the posts (The other 6 are on the head posts, 2 of which I had to fill in again due to stupidity)

Third pic is of said stupidity. The redder post worked out really well, with the filled in block blending in very well with the colour. The browner block not so much. There wasn't enough left of the off cut of that piece, so I had to make do with another. Oh well.

Fourth and fifth pics are the dry assembled foot end. It's come up even better than I had hoped.

I had mentioned in an earlier post about another forehead slap moment. That was cutting the angle on the top rail - I missed the marking line by about 2mm, but on that angle meant the flat section in the middle was only about 5cm - not enough for the full width of the wider slat. I toyed with angling the slat, but that sounded like trouble.

The fix came by way of clamping a straight edged bit of scrap on each side along the edge of the piece, leaving the right amount of pointy bit poking out and planing it down flat. End result has worked out well, even though the rail is a little narrower than I had originally intended

[ian]

looking pretty good from this distance

[Sawdust Maker]

Looks good from here too

[Stiebs]

Yeah, but they don't look quite so good up close. Better now though after I took some of the slats back down to 80 and up through 120 and 180 again last night. Tonight is 240 then gluing before moving back onto the head end.

ian, on from your comment above, I thought about hand sawing the tenons, but after a couple of tests, I decided I'm not good enough with a dovetail saw, so I ended up doing the slat tenons on the router table.

To do the sides of the tenons on the angled end of the slats, I stood all 8 pieces on end together, so that the ends were flat on the table and the long edge of the slats at an angle to the router table fence. I clamped a couple of blocks on each end of the stack of slats to create a straight edge to run against the fence, and voila. Then did the long edge of the tenons individually. Only took about 10 minutes to do the lot.

[Sawdust Maker]

... I clamped a couple of blocks on each end of the stack of slats to create a straight edge to run against the fence, and voila. Then did the long edge of the tenons individually. Only took about 10 minutes to do the lot.

But you didn't take a piccy

[Stiebs]

But you didn't take a piccy

Yeah, I know. Tell you what, I'll make sure to take pics when I do the slats for the head. They've been cut to rough length and the angled cut made. Tomorrow I should get time to do the mortises.


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[Stiebs]

Few more photos on making the angled tenons on my router table. Progress so far after a rainy Saturday is pretty good with all pieces sanded down silky smooth and everything glued together and assembled ready for finishing. No pics of the finished product yet, but they'll come soon enough.

(Thanks to my dad and 2.yo daughter for their assistance in sanding. And even more thanks to dad for distracting 2.yo with other things!)

Pics:
1. Head end with the vertical slats laid out for marking out.
2. Check the depth of the mortises. 10mm, as expected.
3. Set the router bit for 10mm
4. Stack all the slats together
5. A solid block on either end of the stack
6. Stand the slats upright, and angle them back so the end grain is flat on the router table. Clamp tight
7. Run through the router. Perfect example to why you don't want to use a router - you can see a couple of the slats had a piece splinter off (Notably third from the right). For me, my skill with the hand tools would likely have ended up with a worse result.
8. Just showing the angles
9. Rinse and repeat with the other side of the tenon.
10. Showing the angles again.

Despite the couple of splintered pieces, I'm happy with the end result. Once its smoothed down a bit and all assembled, I really have to look to notice it.

[Stiebs]

Bed complete after first coat of danish oil.

Pics of detail to come.

[Sawdust Maker]

looks good