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!!