The Sleigh Bed: Part V

Hi all,

Now we need to attach the crest rails to the bed.  Out of the extra 5" on each crest rail blank,
cut off two 2" pieces and mark them so you know which piece came from which rail.  I marked one the tail and the other the head to keep them straight.

Now go back to the templates used for the legs.  Mark the positions for the dowel rods
and two alignment holes on the template.

and transfer this to the 2" crest rail pieces.

Attach to the end of the crest rail and drill the start of the dowel rod holes.  My Forstner bits are not long enough to finish the holes with the jig installed, so I drilled as far as I could and did the rest trying to be careful to keep the bit straight at all times while I was drilling.

When done the edge of the crest rail looks like this.

Then mount the jig on the leg and drill dowel holes again.

Now dowel rod assembly is always fussy, so be prepared to shave a little here and there
on the parts as you try to fit them together.  But it all works out and you have installed a crest rail!

After both crest rails are installed the bed looks like this.

Next, I need to do the slats.  They will fit into the dados in the crest rail and connector rail as shown
below.  I am using a flexible ruler to get the curve I want.  Then I need to make a template for the slats I'll use for the front of the bed.

I like to practice so I made the template and then cut out some slats out of a 2 x 6 construction grade piece of pine.  The ends of the slat have to be notched to fit into the dadoes.  Doing this for each slat can lead to errors, so I'm going to assemble all the slats first and then cut the notches all at once.  Here is that pine slat.
You can see how the notches are not cut accurately enough.

But even so, you can start to get a feel for how the slat pieces will work out.
Here are 4 pine slats fitted into the front of the bed.

Next, the actual slat work!

The Sleigh Bed: Part IV

Hi all,

Now we do the crest rails.

The first thing we do is to prepare the blanks which are about 65" by 6 1/2".

The crest rails will be 60" wide but we will need some extra material on the ends

to make jigs to help us drill dowell rod holes.  So we will make then 65 " long for now.

As you can see in the picture above, there are a lot of cuts.  Once done we throw away the

triangular waste pieces to be left with this.

So if we clamp them the final look will be this.

I used biscuits to join the pieces.  I cut slots in all three parts and then glued them together.

The biscuits look like this prior to gluing.

Then I use a lot of clamps -- I actually need more!!  That is on my wish list I think.

Next is the cove cut which means you run the glued assembly through the table saw

at an angle to create a dished out curve.  Here is the plan.

Here is a picture of this setup.

and here is a close up using a practice cut to show you what I mean.  You can see how

the angled cut will cut out the dish.

And here is a closeup of how I set the guide fence for this cut using the scraps with the marked distances.

And finally, here is the finished cut!

Next cut a dado down the center of one edge.  I used a palm router with an edge guide

and made a lot of passes to get to the depth I wanted.

Now flip the assembly over.  It is not round at all on the top at this point.  So I started to work

on removing material using my handplanes.  It starts looking like this.

and eventually looks like this.

I fined tuned the rounding using a small microplaner.

Here are the two rounded crest rails next to one of the cross rails.  They have now been cut to their 60" size.

Next the dowel rod work.

The Sleigh Bed: Part III

Hi all,

Now the next step is the connect the cross rails to the legs.  This is done with
a tenon and mortise joint.  The cross rails are cut out to size first and then the tenons on each cross rail are cut.  These tenon fit into mortises that are cut into the legs.   The easiest thing to do to make the mortises was to use my small router -- a palm router -- with a small bit to route close to the layout lines all around the markup lines. Then I freehand removed the waste between those line.  I routed to a depth of 3/8" or so
so it is not very deep.  Then I used my chisels to clean up to the lines of the layout.  So now
I have a pretty good match to my layout but it is only cut shallowly.
The actual mortise is over 1" deep, so I remove most of the rest of the
waste using a Forstner bit in my drill press.  I have to keep repositioning the bit location in the drill press
in order to remove the waste so I just move the piece until the Forstner bit hits my 3/8" deep wall and then
drill down.  Then there is a lot of careful chisel work to make the mortise right.
Here is the drill press all setup and ready to go.

Next, here is a picture of the mortise for the leg mostly cut out using the drill press.
Still a lot of chisel work to do.

The tenon on the cross rail is cut with the router and a guide and that is pretty easy.  Just clamp the cross piece to the workbench and cut a side, rotate and cut the next side and so forth.
Here is a picture of a finished tenon and mortise joint.

Once the joints are done, I did a dry fit of the front of the bed.

In this picture, you can see the bed connector in the leg also.
After they are all done, I can do another assembly in the garage.  It is starting to look like a bed!

Just to get an idea about the slats, roughly speaking here is how the slats fit it.
The fit into a dado in the cross rail we just connected with the mortise and tenon joint at the bottom
and at the top they fit into a dado in the crest rail.  The crest rail is the top cross rail and it is nicely curved and harder to make!

I cut the dado out using my router table and then cut a bevel on the inside edge of the cross rail
as you can see in the next picture.

If you look closely at where the cross rail connects to the leg, I think you can notice the bevel and the dado.
Next, the crest rail!!

The Sleigh Bed: Part II

Hi all,

The next step in the sleigh bed is making the rails that connect the front and back of the bed.
The front and back legs and the rails need to have a bed rail connector put it so we can take the bed
apart when we want to.  To do this, I have to cut shallow mortises into these pieces and insert
the connectors.  So my chisels have to be sharp.  I use a simple sharpening station to do this.
I have sandpaper grits from coarse to very fine -- 80 grit to 800 grit -- glued to stone or glass plates.
I use a tool to set the angle of my chisel and then I sharpen it by starting at the coarse and moving toward
the fine.  Once that is done, you add a microbevel.  On the Veritas tool I have it is simple to do that.
I just rotate a setting on the tool and the angle changes slightly.  Then I resharpen using only fine grits
until the microbevel is established.

The picture shows my sharpening setup and the Veritas tool.  Here is a closeup of the Veritas tool set up to use.  You roll the tool up and down on the various grits to sharpen.

Next, I did a practice mortise on some ash stock I had.  The bed rail connectors will look like this
when done.

and I have to make sure the fit is tight so it looks good.  When connected it should look snug.

The problem is the rails are 80 inches long and the legs are big too.  So what is straightforward to do
on a small piece is harder because of the physical size.  I started by making a template out of wood.
Then I could lay it on the edge of each rail, layout where to cut the shallow mortise and then do it.
I removed most of the shallow mortise using a small router with a 1/8" spiral cutting bit.  Then I fine tuned
the fit with chisels.  It is pretty slow and painstaking work but I like it as it is like meditation.  Here is the setup along with the template on the table next to it.

The mortises on cut on the ends so the layout looks like this.

After installation they look like this.  The rails have the connectors with the hooks that slide into
the other connector on the legs.

Then I did the same thing on the legs. Again, the layout is the key thing as it has to be precise.
When done I assembled to see how it looked.

Here is the proud papa with this step!

and finally, a dry run setup on the floor of the garage.

Next, I cut the mortise and tenon joints that are used to connect the cross rails
to the legs.

The Nightstands are finished!

Hi all,

Both nightstands are now done.  For the second nightstand, we decided that using a final coat of
gloss varnish would be nice.  When Pauli was doing the finishing, she noticed the blue tinted drawer
and the sea foam looked really nice when the satin varnish was wet, so after we thought about it,
we decided we could capture that effect with a final coat of gloss varnish.
Here it is in the bunny mansion -- the art studio -- right before moving it into the house.
The flash picture reflected off the drawer making it look like a sunset.  Nice.

Then we moved it into the house.  Here is what our bedroom looks like now.
We have a nightstand on either side of the 4 poster bed I made about 12 years ago.

This shows the sea foam nightstand and the next one shows the giant squid nightstand.

It took about 2 years but it was worth it.  We use the storage behind the doors for various things.
Definitely books for me!