I was able to make some progress over the previous weekend. We are now mostly done with the construction and most of the work that remains is just finishing.
I built the drawer that will fit under the bed. The construction is simple, a flat square box just smaller than the bed itself. Components are glued and screwed together (hopefully one day I will have a dado stack so I can make some easy box joints for this type of work).
I cut a slot in all the side panels to accept a thin (4mm) piece of plywood as the base of the drawer. It tried to get the slot as tight as possible without being overly tight which should help with the rigidity of the drawer. Unfortunately I had to use two separate pieces of ply wood as the piece I had left over was too narrow to be used as one piece.
Due to the small gap between the 2 sections I added a support for the middle (well almost the middle, it is slightly off center). This adds rigidity to the bottom and stops small items from falling through. I glued in a thin strip to keep both halves pushed into the slots in the sides of the drawer. It would seriously weaken the drawer if the bottom was to slip out of the slots.
P.S. the block visible on the left is just there to keep pressure on the strip until the glue is dried.
Some screws to stabilize both boards.
The support seen from the back (bottom) of the drawer)
All and all it isn't the prettiest drawer I have ever made, but once everything is filled and painted it should do the job nicely.
I still have to add cutouts for handles on the drawer as well as the 4 caster wheels to the bottom, I'm in two minds on how to do this, on the cot we have now the wheels are fixed directly to the hardboard bottom, an it seems strong enough, but to my mind it just feels weird to add wheels directly to such thin material!
After the drawer I got cracking with the "roof" of the bed. I cut all pieces and rounded most of the edges. Then came assembly. I found that even though I anticipated the structure to be a little flimsy it really was not strong enough. So I had to think on my feet and decided to add some "gussets" to the frame. This is the end result.
Now the big job of filling, sanding, and paining starts (and yes this task has now moved from SWAMBO and has fallen squarely on my shoulders
). I think doing the finishing will be critical for this project as it will change the look of the bed significantly.
Thanks for looking!