Just over a month ago I started on building a version of the design I described in my last post. The design has changed in small ways, mostly simplifications and optimizations and in some cases addition of critical details. As usual it involved a trip to Boulter Plywood Corp. in Medford, MA where I bought all the material for the inside frame of the bed, all Poplar and a little bit of plywood and for the outside panels which is all Sapele. It was my largest lumber order to date and I selected each board and they kindly delivered it since it wouldn’t fit in the Audi. I have to say the quality of the S4S lumber from Boulter is wonderful, very straight, very cleanly milled, very few defects.
In addition to ordering fasteners, drawer slides, handles, leveling feet, webbing, bolts, a drilling guide block, hard wax oil finish, more clamps. I acquired a new machine, a Grizzly Industrial bench top mortising machine. This has improved the quality of my mortise and tenon joints by leaps and bounds, not to mention the speed.
I also built a panel raising jig for my table saw, it consists of a tall add on fence to support the panels and a raised feather board to help keep the panels flush to the fence when cutting the the bevels on the panels. I iterated a little bit on this but all in all it did a great job cutting all the panels.
As usual I started building from the inside out, the bed frame that supports the mattress is built in four sub-modules. I chose to frame it out of 1 3/4” x 3 1/2” poplar, each sub module has one doubled post and then three other posts that are going to bolt to their neighboring module to form a doubled post at every intersection. There are eight mortise and tenon joints per module, each module is essentially identical except that the foot modules have their top rails on one side cut down to 3” to give more room for the drawers that will be installed in the foot of the bed.
I installed leveling feet in all the corners of the sub modules. I carefully drilled bolt holes between all of the modules after clamping them together square to each other. I used 3/8” x 4” bolts with washers and lock washers to bolt them together. Then I cut the slats ( 3/4” x 3 1/2” Poplar) to length and spaced them two inches apart and then connected them with upholstery webbing. The frame is very solid.
Next I worked on fabricating the panels that are going to wrap the frame. For each panel created the perimeter frame out of 3/4” x 3 1/2” Sapele joining them with mortise and tenon joints. Each frame part gets a 1/4” x 1/4” groove on it’s inside edge to accept the floating panel. After dry fitting each frame I measured for the floating panel and cut it from 3/4” x 9 1/4” Sapele boards allowing 3/8” extra to fit into the groove. I used the panel raising jig to cut a 2” wide bevel on the front of each panel and then I put a 1/4” x 1/4” rabbet on the back side so there is a 1/4” edge tongue around the edge of the panel that centers it in the frame.
Adjacent panels have a dry tongue and groove joint that connects the sub modules. I dry fitted adjacent panels to make sure the fit between modules was correct. The foot board was complicated, I joined the uprights of the foot board to the intersecting panels with grooves and splines. The nineteen spindles between the two rails required a LOT of tweaking to get right. Because the modules have to come apart, the rails will be inserted into dry mortise and tenon joints in the uprights and held in place by pressure from the sub module bases.
Next I built the two huge drawer bodies 8” x 40” x 31 3/4” out of Poplar for the sides and 1/4” plywood for the bottom.
I fitted them in their corresponding sub frames and added internal structure to support the heavy duty drawer slides.
And finally I started installing the panels onto the modules with the foot right module. I sanded all the frame parts 80 ( for the ones that I milled ), 120, 220, and 320 grit. I applied General Finishes Hard Wax Oil to the raised panel first so that if it shifted around in the frame there wouldn’t be any unfinished edges showing. I then glued up each panel and applied finish to the frame after the glue had cured.
I then assembled the panels onto the sub frame and attached them with cabinet screws from the back side. I carefully spaced the drawer front inside it’s frame and attached the drawer hardware and screwed the drawer face on from inside the drawer.
Here is the first completed sub-module, I’m really happy with the progress so far, there are a few tweaks and probably a second coat of finish but mostly it’s just repeat this process four more times…
