7/3/2016

As you can well imagine, the whole ordeal with our daughter forced us to reassess a few things. One of the less significant byproducts of this process was that I moved her bed to the top of my to-do list. We bought a typical crappy yet expensive (for what you are getting) pine bed for her room when we moved into the house in 2011. It came apart all by itself within two years due to the extremely poor construction and workmanship. It has now been propped up against the wall for months to stop it from collapsing.

I decided on a fairly common Japanese style of construction, which does not necessitated any glue-ups and processed some more of my pile of Scots Pine (Pinus sylvestrus) for the project. The beam that was destined for the side rails was so huge I had to ask my gardener Adam to help me rip it into two pieces on the bandsaw.

Here I am squaring up two sides (face side and face edge) by hand before doing the opposing sides with the help of electrons.

My version of a crochet in action.

In the picture below you can see my sliding-deadman-cum-leg-vise showing off it’s versatility. For heavy and thick beams like this it works well to have the beam sit on a dog (as pictured) while the leg vise jaw secures it up against the side of the bench.

As usual, my shop made scrub plane made short work of removing heaps of material.

Here you can see the aggressive camber on it’s Lie-Nielsen blade.

I did the fine tuning with a circa 1896 type 8 no. 8 Stanley jointer plane (not pictured).

Rail stock prepared and awaiting the next assault on it’s integrity.

In the meantime I dug out some Tasmanian Blackwood that my father used to build crates to transport all his tools to my current shop 5 years ago. I really like using and reusing wood like this. It adds value to the story of the piece of furniture. In fact, every bit of timber in this bed used to be something else in a previous life. The Scots pine comes from a crate that was used to transport a massive machine from Germany to Namibia.

The Tasmanian Blackwood were processed to become the slats of the bed.

Cutting the Scots pine for the legs.

Just have a look at how perfect it came out of this legendary Landgon Miller’s Falls no. 75 ACME Mitre saw box.

Squaring up the leg stock by hand planing.

I did the measuring out of the tenon locations by using the actual pieces as they were destined to fit together. As you can see that all transpired on my shop made assembly table.

The Langdon mitre box also came in very handy to cut the shoulders of the tenons. You can see the stop on the arms that allow one to set the exact depth of cut. The cheeks were cut on the band saw.

I usually employ my Stanley no. 10 rabbet plane to plane the cheeks down to the exact measurements.

The slots for the tenons in the top of the legs had to be as close to perfect as possible as it is very difficult to remove material after the sawing is done. Therefore I took to it with my Bad Axe Roubo Beast Master. You will notice the three short cuts in the waste which I made to warm up. Completing this many monster cuts by hand certainly saves on Gym membership.

The waste was removed with my shop made bow saw followed by chiseling.

Legs being cut to final length.

Next up, the fitting of the massive tenons into their respective slots.

Once both tenons for each leg fitted perfectly, I used a shop made marking knife to mark out the exact location for the two slots where the tenons hook into each other.

The picture below should give you an idea of what the tenons look like in the end. They hook into each other inside the slots at the top of the legs. This is a surprisingly sturdy joint, even in the absence of any adhesive. The absence of adhesives allow the wood to move freely during changes in ambient humidity and it is also easy to take apart in future to collapse the bed for easier transport.