New to forum - help with a bed?

[GregLewis]

Hi guys,
My name is Greg, 35, living on the beautiful south coast of nsw.
Brand new to the forum, but a relatively hands on bloke who doesn't mind a challenge every now and then. Currently rebuilding a house almost from scratch.
Love working with timber - was working as a timber floor sand/polisher up until 2 years ago, but still have all my gear and like nothing more than restoring old hardwood into beautiful feature peices. However, I have very little to do with furniture construction.
So, being a member of forums that deal with other interests, and brand new to this one, I hope I'm not going to sound too much like a squeeky wheel - but I am very keen to build myself a queensized bed, much like this one....see attatchment.

Ok, so it appears to be a very straight forward kind of design - however I plan on building it out of ironbark or spotted gum, and using slabs with a natural edge as the head and foot board. I have local places to get the timber, and I'll be able to sand and polish it all up to look really good.

However - as I said, I have very, very little experience in constructing anything like this - I've built chook sheds, dog kennels, rabbit hutches etc, but nothing like this, so I would greatly appreciate any help I can get with the actual construction of the bed.
It is obvioulsy going to be very heavy, so being able to take it apart is a no brainer. I'd particularly like advise as to how to create the head and foot boards of the bed - ie joining the slabs to the posts - but any other advice will certainly be very welcome. My main concern is getting the bed frame firm and rigid.

I do not have a drill press, router, or thicknesser - but I'm pretty sure that I can take the timber into the local joinery and get stuff cut/drilled for me if necessary.

Thanks in advance for any help.
Regards,
Greg

[Harry72]

The best way to join the slabs to the post's would be to mortice and tenon joints, seeming you dont have lots of tools you could do what they call a floating tenon joint. It differs from a M&T joint by having two mortices and then using a separate tenon between the mortices.
This joint can be achieved with basic hand/power tools, after marking out the mortices its just a matter of drilling out then chiseling them to the markings.
You can make the mortices to the standard sized wood from the hardware store ie 40x19mm or 60x19mm etc etc for the tenons.

To join the head/foot boards to the stretchers/sides you can buy knock down fittings for this very purpose from specialty woodworking supplies like Elracos.

[GregLewis]

Thanks for that Harry -
Ok, so I'm visualising the floating MT join - two mortices with a 'loose' block between them. Cool, so does this block get glued in? Or should I use dowel, or bolts?
I like the hangers btw - they seem pretty straight forward - are there particular ones that I should avoid/ go for? Its going to be a big heavy bed and I'm about 95 kgs and the missus is about 55kgs.

Thanks again,
Greg

[Harry72]

Yep the floating tenon is glued in place, those brakets are strong enough.

[Hundred Miltrik]

Greg a cam and bolt system like this saves on doing joinery and is very strong:

Häfele - Maxifix®

See the picture just under the magnifying glass, that gives you an idea of what it's all about (except without the dowels, I use two cams one above the other). The system has 3 components:

-Screw-in sleeve with internal thread (to screw cam-bolt into)
-Cam bolt (the joiner between the other two elements)
-Cam (round thing you turn with an allen key to tighten the join)

This can be used all round. 4 for the headboard (2 at each end) and ditto for the footboard and the two side rails and the centre rail.

You can drill the holes yourself with a power drill in hand, but the end-grain hole that allows the bolt to go through to the cam has to be pretty accurate. A doweling jig can do this but if you can't get your hands on one maybe you'll need to get that done for you. If you do that probably just get the joinery to do the cam holes as well cos they are 35mm dia and have to be fairly accurate for depth as well.

A couple of things to consider with the overall bed design...It's best to use a centre rail. What this does is allow you to use smaller width slats which increases airflow. This is very important for your mattress. I use 50mm slats with a 50mm gap. Not sure if you've alrady considered this but yeah...please don't use 2x4 as slats!

[GregLewis]

Ah yes, thats some more great advice Trik, thankyou for that input.
I'm still a little way off commencing the build - still got to put in a kitchen and then do the fix out - but it is great having this info now so I can really think about how I'm going to do it.
Much appreciated info guys,
Best regards,
Greg

[pampelmuse]

When I built my queen bed I totally over-engineered the connections between the centre rails/sides and the bed head and foot. I ended up using three centre rails across the width and each had two of those hook and slot bed connectors at each junction (they look a little like the top connector in Harry72's Elacros link above) with bolts through each stretcher to clamp the twin connectors onto the timber and give a much stronger join (this meant 12 connectors total on the stretcher ends plus 4 heavier corner brackets for the sides). Part of the reason for so many brackets was to avoid creaking and flexing but the other was because I was using 8mm mdf for the slats which doesn't have much rigidity so needed several stretchers to mimimise the unsupported distances across the bed width.
The stretchers also came in useful as I used two of them as sash cramps to hold the foot and bed head together during glue up, each of which I made with mortice and tenon joinery. I got all my metal knockdown fittings from Hafele but I don't know the parts names or even if they still stock those particular types but I could get a photo of them if you wanted to know what to look for. Of course the downside of using all that metal was my fittings had to be extremely accurately placed so all the connectors could engage at once. The only way I could achieve that was to dry assemble the whole thing before marking out all the screw holes. This took up a lot of space of course! In hindsight it would have been easier to cut stronger slats from any old recycled timber as you don't see them under the mattress. But then that was also my first major woodwork project and I knew a lot less back then.

[GregLewis]

Hi guys,
Well, I've pretty much finished my house now, and I've also recently completed building the bed.
I'm well aware that there are some seriously talented wood workers on this forum, but nevertheless - I'm totally stoked with my effort and I hope it will see many comfortable nights for me, and hopefully a few more owners! Its not really the sort of thing that'll ever get thrown away I'd imagine.
Anyway, I've built it out of Iron Bark.
The posts are 5", with a bit of feature to them, and the head and foot boards are approximately 55mm thick.
I sourced the timber from Pete Davidson at Termeil on the far south coast nsw. Top bloke, with some really nice peices available.
The sanding was full on - the corregations from the saw he used were in some places around 6mm deep. Geez, it was a lot of sanding, but fortuantly I've got my edger (from my floor sanding days) which makes life a little easier.
A little.
It still took a solid few days to get the slabs and posts rough sanded!
But, as many of you will know, once you get the iron bark going, it really starts to come to life and show you what sort of colours and patterns you'll get out of it. Pretty early on I knew I'd scored some ripper pieces.
As for the construction of the bed, I decided against the hanging brackets that were suggested, and instead I checked out 15mm deep mortices on each of the posts for the stringers to sit in, and then I used a pair of thumping great coach bolts on each post to hold them solid.
The head and foot boards were attatched to the post using 19mm dowel - three on each side for the head board, two each side for the foot board. Holes were drilled - by hand with my trusty, and old, 14.4v Makita drill with a speed bore! Lots of battery changes. I would love to hear of alternative methods of drilling into the end grain of large slabs to fit dowels.
The weight of the head board and attached posts is pretty much a joke. Fricking heavy. Quite honestly, I'd estimate it to weigh between 120 and 140kgs. I ended up using the weight out of a sash window as a roller, and a plank, and went all Stonehenge on its ass to get the fecker from my shed to the bedroom. Took ages, and was extra stressful because I'd only just sanded and polished the floor boards in the house! Still, took my time and it all went fine, no scratches on the floor!
I'd planned on putting in a centre stringer and using 19mm slats, but due to what you could almost call a 'hundred mill trick', it wasn't possible to fit the centre stringer. Basically it came about because I wanted to utilise the space under the bed. The stringers were originally going to be 300mm deep, but this left no real space, so I thinned them to 200mm, and that gave me all the space I wanted - but I forgot about the centre stringer until after things were glued up and I decided to bugger it and just use 90 x 35 pine instead. It worked out perfect though - I've got 270mm under the stringers - plenty for rolling baskets.
The slats are spaced at 70mm, double screwed on each end, and were cut slightly short so there is no chance of rubbing or squeaking against the main frame.
The finish coat I used is some stuff call Surface Seal, made by Peerless. I did a spotted gum floor years and years ago with the stuff, and fell in love with how it coats the floor, but still leaves the texture of the grain. Its kinda like Tung Oil, but way better. It doesn't hold up too well on floors, but obviously on things like beams or posts, or indeed furniture, its perfect.

All up, as I said, I'm stoked with the end product. Totally solid, with absolutely no movement or squeaks, and I reckon you can't beat natural looking timber with lots of feature.
Oh, I also came up with a really simple little sidetable that can be dropped onto a bed post whenever its needed - there's not enough room for a proper table, so I did this instead - photos are pretty self explanitory!

Anyway guys, here's a few pictures of the build. Thanks again.
Regards.
Greg

[Noctoadal]

Jeez Greg that is a monster!

But, really lovely piece of furniture. That thing will outlast religion by the looks of it. Thanks for the details (and humourous) write up--it was a joy to read!

I liked reading about your innovations and alterations, I think it's very clever. The 'side table' is quite a neat concept too! Well done!