King Bed in Cherry and Walnut build, part one

A king-sized bed frame is a jumbo project.  My lumber shopping list included 49 board-feet of 5/4 cherry, 10 board-feet of 12/4 cherry, 52 board-feet of 5/4 walnut, and 5 board-feet of 4/4 maple for the slats.  To make sure they’d have enough in stock, I emailed Woodcraft a couple of weeks in advance and let them know I was looking for that much 5/4 stock.  On Veterans’ Day I rented a U-Haul van and picked up the wood.

The reason for all that 5/4 stock is that all but a few of the pieces of this bed are 2 inches thick.  I could have bought 12/4 stock and planed it down, but (A) I wasn’t sure I could handle pieces that huge by myself, and (B) in most cases the seam where I glued boards together wouldn’t be visible.  I did buy 12/4 stock for the posts, where a visible seam would have been unsightly.

My DeWalt planer made short work of milling the 5/4 boards to a consistent 1 inch thickness.  I used my track saw to put a good edge on each piece, and then selected pairs of boards for laminating together.  I had a fair number of nasty-looking knots and gnarly grain to work around in the walnut pieces; fortunately I could orient the boards so that the least attractive faces would be either sandwiched inside, covered by the mattress and box spring, or against the wall where they won’t be seen.  Using plenty of glue (Titebond III) and a host of clamps and cauls, I glued up my pairs of boards with the good edges aligned.  After the glue dried I used that good edge as a starting point to cut my pieces to final width and length.

Handling 8-foot-long pieces of 2-inch-thick stock was a challenge that taxed the dimensions of my shop.  With the blade raised to 2-1/2 inches, I learned that the distance from the leading edge of my table saw blade to the back wall of the shop, unobstructed, is 98 inches — I was barely able to rip the 97-inch-long pieces.  The maximum side clearance to the left of my blade is only about 55 inches thanks to the router table and bandsaw, both of which sit up higher than the table saw.  Fortunately I had plenty of distance and about 4 feet of table to the right of the blade, so the worst I had to do was reposition.  That still left a lot of wood hanging off the right end of my crosscut sled, making the stock want to tip instead of lying flat; I slid a scrap of 1/2-inch plywood (same thickness as my sled bottom) under the overhanging part at the far right edge of the saw table to keep the beams in plane while I cut them to length.

 

Frames

Most of the mass of this bed comes from the two cherry frames that make up the main parts of the headboard and footboard.  In concept they are very simple, stub-tenon-and-groove assemblies which will enclose a pair of walnut lattice panels.  Execution proved a little more challenging than usual.

To make the posts (stiles), I started with a piece of 12/4 cherry that was 7-1/2 inches wide and 113 inches long — way more than I needed, but that’s what Woodcraft had.  I knew from trimming the laminated pieces that sawing through 3-inch thick cherry would severely tax my Delta contractor’s saw, thin kerf blade notwithstanding, so I tried a different strategy.  First I crosscut my behemoth piece to 77 inches long, making two passes on the table saw and supporting the offcut with a piece of plywood so it wouldn’t pinch the blade.  Then I swapped out my usual 1/4″ bandsaw blade for a 5/8″ 3tpi blade and used the bandsaw to rip two pieces 2-3/8″ wide.  The bandsaw went right through that cherry without so much as a groan of complaint, and careful guiding against the fence gave me straight, albeit not wonderfully smooth, cuts.  I then ran the pieces through my surface planer to get one clean side and flipped them to get the other side parallel and reduce them to a final thickness of 2 inches.  One of the narrow faces on each piece was flat enough to register against a fence, so I trimmed them to 2-11/16 on the table saw and put the narrow faces through the planer to reduce them to 2-1/2 inches with nice, smooth faces.  Now I could crosscut them on the tablesaw to get two 36-inch posts for the headboard and two 24-inch for the footboard.

My inner stiles are laminations of 1-inch thick pieces; I just glued the boards together after initial planing and then cut my two pieces.  The finished inner stiles are 6 inches wide by 15-1/2 for the footboard and 24 for the headboard.  The upper and lower rails of each assembly are also laminations milled to varying widths (the lower one is an inch or so wider than the upper) and a uniform 77-inch length.

The challenge came in milling the stub tenon and groove joints.  I set my dado up for 5/8″ width and 3/4″ depth of cut and made two passes to create a groove 1 inch wide and 3/4″ deep centered along one edge of each rail, both edges of the inner stiles, and the inside edge of each post.  The short pieces were easy; those 77-inch rails, though, got really heavy and wanted to lift off the blade in the last few inches despite my roller stand providing outfeed support.  I ended up using a chisel to flatten the last inch or so of a couple of the grooves.
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I usually mill the stub tenons on the tablesaw, but with the length and weight of these pieces there was no way to make that a safe operation.  Sure, I could’ve done the shorter pieces, but then I’d be using two different setups for the same cut — always a recipe for bad-fitting joints.  So I grabbed the edge guide for my PC690 router — an accessory I haven’t used in probably 20 years — and added a plywood strip for a guide fence.  A 1-inch flat-top straight bit checked into the router and adjusted for 3/4″ depth of cut and 3/4″ of exposure would do the job.  All I had to do was figure out how I was going to hold the stock steady while I routed.

A pair of aluminum bench dogs let me securely hold the end and a sacrificial scrap to prevent tear-out from the router bit.  My portable roller stand held up the far end to keep the work supported while I routed the tenon on each end.  Without the new bench, I probably would have had to clamp the rail down to my saw table and work off one end of it.  This was much easier.  Of course I tested my setup on a scrap piece before milling the actual tenons.

To clean up the long edges, I shifted the piece to the right and used the face vise and a Woodpeckers knuckle clamp in the T-track to secure the rail to the bench and ran my block plane along the lip on either side of the groove, removing saw marks.  Then I flipped each piece over, re-secured it, and used my jointer plane to do the same to the ungrooved edge.  The little bench stayed put very nicely; I was pleasantly surprised, given the mass of the pieces I was planing.

With my frames dry-fit together, I double-checked the measurements for my lattice panels:  36-1/4″ wide and 15-1/2″ (footboard) or 24″ (headboard) high.

So far, so good.

 

 

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