Bed

[Steve Maskery]

I have made several beds in my time. Some of them have been one-offs, others have been part of a bedroom suite. I did a whole suite in Mackintosh style, but I can find every piece except the bed, which was stunning. I'm no longer in contact with the clients (plus they got divorced soon after and I don't know which one of them, if either, kept the bedroom). Here are some Blue Peter pieces from 20 and 30 years ago:













I now need to make another bed, this time for myself. It's going to be as straightforward as I can manage, no complex curves, no challenging joints, just simple and easy, in the hope that I get time to sleep in it before I plop me clogs.

This is what I plan to build:


I already have the mattress and the slatted base underneath. The vertical slats follow Fibonacci.

The challenges are mainly with the timber itself. When we bought this house 2 or 3 years ago, I bought the supply of timber in the barn. Much of is is short lengths, of little use to me. But there is pallet of oak, best part of a cubic metre. It looked great until I got it down from the hay loft. The boards are less than 2.1m long, very wonky, some woodworm and spalting. It's not anywhere near as good as I thought I was buying.

The other problem is that it is all one thickness, a very generous inch, but the twists and cups mean that I'm lucky to get 23 mm of them, Some are only 20mm.

So the legs are being built up in layers. There is another advantage to this - I can make the rail/leg joing invisible, like this one:


So the legs are from three layers. I've glued the first two layers together and then it is over to the drill press to drill a 20mm cavity for the M12 nut and then right through at 12.5mm:



I use the embedded nut technique a lot in my jigs, but it is usually only M6 or M8 and often only in MDF. Thises are M12 into oak, it is a very different ball game.

Then it was time to glue on the last layer:



To be continued...

 

[Dr.Al]

Watching with interest

 

[SamQ aka Ah! Q!]

I remember your chest of drawers and wardrobe builds, Steve....... I too am watching with interest, but also cheering you on, given your age-related comments elsewhere. Believe me M8, we are all in this age thing together.

 

[Steve Maskery]

I've worked out that the reason I don't have any pictures of the Mackintosh bed is because it was pre-digital. I may have some paper photos somewhere, but a lot of stuff got thown when I moved house (four times since then...).
However, it was published in Good Woodworking magazine, so if anyone has a GW library pre-2002 (when I bought my first digital camera) and comes across a bed article, please let me know!
S

 

[Pete Maddex]

A bed is one thing on my list of things to make, so watching with interest.

Pete

 

[Phil]

A bed is one thing on my list of things to make, so watching with interest.

Pete

Same here. But at my rate of progress it would be better to start on the Ash-Box.

 

[Cabinetman]

What happens with the bolt head showing Steve? Have I followed it correctly that the last of the three layers covers it over? It’s as good a way as I’ve seen.
I’ve shown the way I do beds previously, imagine a 14” section of side rail permanently glued into big mortices in the legs, a stub rail. The actual side rails are then screwed onto these.
Ian

 

[Steve Maskery]

What happens with the bolt head showing Steve? Have I followed it correctly that the last of the three layers covers it over? It’s as good a way as I’ve seen.
I’ve shown the way I do beds previously, imagine a 14” section of side rail permanently glued into big mortices in the legs, a stub rail. The actual side rails are then screwed onto these.
Ian

There is no bolt head, Ian, there are two nuts. The one that I have embedded is covered by layer no.3, then the all-thread is inserted into it. That then goes through a channel in the end of the rail and is tightened by another nut accessed by that cavity you can see in the picture above. When complete it is totally invisible and as strong as an ox.

It's going to be slightly different for this bed, although mechanically the same. The rails are only 25mm instead of my usual 33/34mm, but I can beef up the ends neatly to achieve the same structure.
S

 

[Steve Maskery]

Today I have cleaned up the 3-layer blanks. The laminated edges are going to be hidden with a veneer of oak, so I found a nice board and cut some veneers. They have come out at just over 4mm and I only need 3mm, so I have plenty of clean up room. This is the saw setup. I have my short fence turned round so that the tall face is closest to the blade. I can't use my regular overhead guard because the fence is so close, so I use my magnetic stand-alone guard instead.





Then they were glued in place, each leg acting as a caul for the other.



The long legs are in the clamps now. I've had to take out one of my contact lenses so everything looks very strange. I've got glue all over the place as a result and I'm going to have a lot of cleaning up to do tomorrow.
S

 

[AndyT]

I've had to take out one of my contact lenses so everything looks very strange. I've got glue all over the place as a result and I'm going to have a lot of cleaning up to do tomorrow.
S

This would be an impressive, ambitious build for anyone. But for someone with your long term sight problems, it's extra special.

 

[TrimTheKing]

I did the same kind of bolt arrangement but used a threaded insert into the leg and used half moon washers just to make life a little easier because I just drilled a circular access hole with a Forstner. I obviously used threaded rod into the threaded insert rather than a proper bolt.

 

[Steve Maskery]

Nice one, Mark. Where did you get the half-moon washers from? What are they made of? I need stainless for oak.
S

 

[AndyP]

En francais Steve

ÉTRIER FERMÉ Ø 38 x 8

étrier Ø 38 pour vis de lit Ø 8 mm

www.literie-a-domicile.com

Je ne trouve pas en inox.

And a few more options

BRICOVIS

Le spécialiste de la vente en ligne de la visserie et du scellement...

www.bricovis.fr

 

[Dr.Al]

Looks like they're readily available on ebay (I just searched for "half moon nut", although it seems they're also called "lunar nuts"); the one at that link claims stainless.

Looks like AndyP beat me to it!

Edit: it looks like there are half moon nuts and half moon washers; with one you use a normal nut and the other (e.g. this type) has the female thread integrated into it. Every day's a learning day!

Does it need to be stainless? The second one linked above seems to be zinc die-cast.

Out of interest, do the oak/steel problems still occur if the steel is zinc-plated?

 

[TrimTheKing]

Looks like they're readily available on ebay (I just searched for "half moon nut", although it seems they're also called "lunar nuts"); the one at that link claims stainless.

Looks like AndyP beat me to it!

Can't remember where I got mine from but that ebay link is essentially exactly what I used.

 

[Steve Maskery]

I've just read the article I wrote 20-odd tears ago about the Mackintosh bed (which Tim has kindly sent me) and have learned a few things.

According to Nick (Gibbs, the Editor at the time), this is a 40 hour project. Ha! IIRC you can more than double that. I bet that curved headboard took that long.

According to my drawing the side rails are 27mm thick. That sounds to me that they were made from 1 1/4" boards. I'd have said I would normally start with 1 1/2" boards. That gives me food for thought about just how much I have to beef up the rails on my new bed, which currently are a bit on the skinny side.

I begin the article with the phrase, "A while back", so that would explain why I have no digtal photos even though I had a digital camera at the time of publication.

 

[johnward]

I built myself a 4' bed a few years ago similar to your design Steve using Utile and Oak. I'm very pleased with it. Very wise to buy the mattress first as dimensions can vary. For fitting the long rails to the legs I used Hagenia hook-ins. I found them fiddly but once I got their position right but they pulled the rails and legs together nicely and are showing no sign movement.

 

[Steve Maskery]

I've had a few days with no contact lens,which has slowed me down, somewhat. But today I got a bit more done.
I found two nice boards for the long rails. They are not perfect, one has some wormholes and the other a hollow patch of rough sawn.




I am assuming that the wormholes are from when the tree was alive, and would have been kilned dead. I could take another pass through the thicknesser to get rid of the rough patch, but as it stands they have finished at 24mm thick. It's not quite thick enough to house my bolt mechanism, but near enough to make the fix easy and respectable.

I'll just sand the rough patch smooth, that area is not seen and it is not functional, so as long as it is smooth, that is enough. If that sounds not-very-craftsmanlike, I suggest that you take it up with the late David Savage. He did exactly the same thing to preserve thickness. and if it was good enough for him it is most certainly good enough for me.

So the first job here is to rout a groove for the M12 threaded rod and then rout a cavity to access the nut. The remaining thickness of the wood is about 5.2mm, so I have no risk of breaching that wall.
The routing jig has fore and aft stops, and it can slide left and right between the two trigger clamps acting as stops. The jig should have another, adjustable fence at the back, to stop me from coming too far back towards me, but it appears to be missing and I don't understand how or why.




That is the first of the four. Tomorrow I shall do the other three and glue on the patch to create a square hole rather than a groove.
S

 

[Steve Maskery]

Well all the cavities are done now, which is a relief, as I am always nervous about the cutter slipping in the collet and going right through. It's never happened on one of these jobs, but it has more generally, a couple of times.

Next up are the tenons in the ends. This is a perfect job for the Big D.



One of the problems with the Domino system is that the tenons are a fixed size - always the snug size of the smallest waggle. For this I want wider tenons. The machine has indexing stops and a graticule to facilitate bigger mortices, but the size of the tenons is fixed. For a proper glue-up, I can put a couple of Dominoes side by side, but here that would look a bit naff, so I'm going to make my own Dominoes to suit.
I marked out the centres of my two domino slots:


then, with the cutter set to cut dead centre of the board I lined the 10mm mark of the graticule to the centre line of my mortice to make the first cut, then 10mm on the other side to make the second cut.



The result is this:


I'm going to rout the corresponding mortices in the legs, but use a 1/2" cutter. 12mm inside 1/2" will be plenty of cleara3nce to ensure the bed can be assembled by hand without having to hit it with a mallet.

À demain.
S

 

[Steve Maskery]

I've still got eye trouble, so again, not much has got done.
I've cut 4 blocks to complete the channel for the bed bolt. It only just covers the channel, but it's enough, and I can't come much higher as I want the mattress to sit in the frame, not just on the slats.


Looking at that photo now, I think I need to check that I have enough clearance for the nut before I glue the block in place.

The Festool Domino is 20 years old. My DF500 is actually a pre-production machine. When it came out, I was a fairly prolific woody journalist and Festool did a pass-around of this new-fangled gadget. I was, not for the first time in my life, at the end of the queue. So there was no-one to pass it on to. So I rang my contact at Festool and suggested that, rather than just writing a review like every other magazine, it would be better if I used it on various projects over the coming months, to show how it could be used in the real workshop. Of course, he knew eactly what I was asking,, so it was "Oh, go on then". So that is how I come to have a pre-production machine



The 20 year age also means that Festool patents are coming to an end, so third party manufacturers can now offer non-OEM parts and a few weeks ago I was approached by a firm called BuyFindTool. They have sent me two of their products - a set of replacement Domino cutters and a set of fluting cutters for moulding the edges of home-made dominoes.

So that's full disclosure, I believe.

The domino cutters, look to be, as far as I can tell, identical to the branded version. The original 8mm for the DF700 is on the right, the others are the replacements. Good packaging, actually



I think that Festool dropped the ball a bit when they decided to offer Dominoes in one size only. They are always only the width of the smallest waggle for any given thickness. So for any wider tenons, I have to make my own. But the other advantage is that I can machine lengths and cut off just the sizes I need when I need them. The biggest difficulty is thicknessing to exactly the right sixe. Too fat and I risk slitting the workpiece, too skinny and the joint will be sloppy, so I was very careful with my thicknesser.

The reeding cutter looks like this:



And the finished Domino looks like this:


The photo doesn't do it justice, but the reeding looks just like the real thing.

Does it do a good job? Certainly. Is it esential for making your own Dominoes? No. Would I actually buy them with my own money? Er, probably not. I have some bull-nose cutters, a range of roundovers and often I just cut chamfers. They all work just as well. But as a production tool for third-party Dominoes, they are exactly the right tool.

And the end result is:


I wish this eye would settle down, it's being very restrictive.
S

 

[Steve Maskery]

Well I've done a bit more today, but one step forward, two steps back.
You will see from the tenon photos above that the tenons are not in line with the square channel. This means that the mortices in the legs have to be offset to match. I was very well aware of this from the get go, so I was very careful to calculate the offset, measure and mark it, and then check everything, because I knew that one false move and the piece is ruined. So I was confident I had it all set up properly.

And it was wrong. The mortices needed to be centred on the edge of the square channel, instead I had the edges lined up.

Merde.

So I've plugged them so that I can recut them tomorrow, but that may not be enough. If they were too far in, it wouldn't matter. But I might have cut them so that the plug will still be visible when the joint is assembled. I won't know for sure until tomorrow. If it is not seen, I shall live with it, but if it is visible, I shall have no choice but to veneer over that face and do the job properly again.

I could kick myself, because I knew how critical this is.

Stupid, sorry, Steve

 

[Steve Maskery]

Well this morning I went in to the workshop, again with only one eye. I'd worn my right lens reasonably OK for about 4 hours yesterday, but totday it was hurting even before I'd left the bathroom, so out it came. Everything is ten times harder.
However, I cleaned off the plugs I had installed yesterday and it was clear that the shoulders of the rail tenons would not cover the damage. So I planed 3mm off the entire face and glued on another piece. Tomorrow I shall clean that up and dimension it to the original 69mm and start again.
That little rookie error has cost me 48 hours and a board. And a chunk of pride.
S

PS Of course, in the video it will all look perfect. No telling!
PPS Talking of video, umpteen people have complained that the volume on my Festool video is far too low. I don't understand what I've done wrong. I might have to pick the brains of my mate Simon, Who Knows About These Things.

 

[Steve Maskery]

Well it's been a difficult week. Temperatures higher than I've ever experienced (30 - 36C every day and 38 two days, and more to come) and I've had to leave out one contact lens, so progress has been slow and painful.

However.

The recut of the leg mortices went OK. Not sweetly, but OK and it didn't need much fettling (I tapered the loose tenons slightly to ease them in) and so now they do actually fit. Quite well, too.






I did the same to one of the short legs but discovered that the side rail has split around the Domino, and it's on the outside, too. Not terribly severe, but too bad just to be left. So it is now sitting with glue squirted in as far as I can get and then clamped up.

Two legs down, two to go.

I've worn my right lens for nearly 4 hours today, without very much discomfort, so I'm rather hoping that this little inconvenient episode is coming to an end. As I said, slow progress, but at least it is progress.
S

 

[Steve Maskery]

A bit more done today. The glued split looked perfect when I went into the workshop, so I assembled that joint and cut the mortices for the other two legs. It was a relief when it all went together.


Next I'll be able to start on the head and footboards.
S

 

[AndyT]

It's always a good stage in a project when it stops looking like an assortment of parts and starts looking like a piece of furniture.

It does look very close to the floor, but it matches the drawing and you've had beds that low before. The customer is bound to be right!

 

[Steve Maskery]

It does look very close to the floor, but it matches the drawing and you've had beds that low before. The customer is bound to be right!

It's a 30cm deep mattress, so I'm expecting it to end up about 600mm off the floor.
I agree I won't be able to keep much underneath it, though!
S

 

[AndyT]

Certainly no room for a gazunder!

 

[Alasdair]

The old gazunder...

 

[RogerS]

I've worked out that the reason I don't have any pictures of the Mackintosh bed is because it was pre-digital. I may have some paper photos somewhere, but a lot of stuff got thown when I moved house (four times since then...).
However, it was published in Good Woodworking magazine, so if anyone has a GW library pre-2002 (when I bought my first digital camera) and comes across a bed article, please let me know!
S

Strewth, Steve. Those are really quality pieces of furniture.

 

[Steve Maskery]

Strewth, Steve. Those are really quality pieces of furniture.

Thank you, but there is no need to sound so surprised!
I was fairly competent, back in the day. I'm not at all sure I could make any of them now. I'm having enough trials making this fairly simple design now. Progress, yes, but little and slow and lots of Unintendeds along the way.
S

 

[Steve Maskery]

A bit more progress.

The next stage is to make the slats for the headboard and footboard. The wide centre slat is a bit wider than my rough boards, so I decided to do a bookmatch. The problem is that I can't get a pair of boards to the right thickness out of a rough 28mm board, By the time it was all claened up I had a nice pair of boards, but only 8mm thick. No matter, I can present that to the front and make up the thickness with another layer. A vac press is a boon here,
I've ended up with two central slats, bookmatched on the faces that are seen, and I am very happy with them, they will look wonderful when they are polished.
It wasn't totally plain sailing, I did the longer slat first, but it slipped out of place in tha vacbag, so I lost several mm squaring it all back up again. Fortunately I had been generous on the width, so that, even after rectification, it is still a couple of mm wider than I had originally modelled


If I could move the knots around a bit, I would, they are all a bit closer to the edge than I would like, but, let's face it, the tailboard will never be seen because the room isn't big enough to stand back far enough to be able to see it, and the headboard slat will largely be hidden by mattress and pillows.
Plus, when I am in my bedroom
a) I'm not wearing my contact lenses, so I can't see much anyway, and
b) I am asleep, or at least desperately trying to be so!

At present the shorter slat is a couple of mm thicker than the longer one, and, unfortunately, I think it is too short to pass through my thicknesser. Maybe my old Kity. So it will be half an hour with a hand plane or with my drum sander. But I'll wait until I've cut all the other slats (solid, not bookmatched or laminated) so that I can thickness them all at the same time.
S

 

[Steve Maskery]

I'm having a few second thoughts.
I've decided to invert the crest rail to be concave rather than convex. My previous designs have been like that and I was happy with them.
But I'm also considering the colour. The Mackintosh bed pictured above was one of the finest things I have ever created, and the customer did not pay anywhere near the market price for such a work.
So now I have the opprtunity to recreate that splendour with a dark frame with paler splats.
Now two-tone work was very on-trend, back then, it might be a bit dated now. But it might be simply retro.
Decisions, decisions
S

 

[Steve Maskery]

OK the colours are a bit garish, but you get the idea.

 

[AndyT]

I note that you have very sensibly put the curve on the edge which doesn't need lots of nicely fitted mortise and tenon joints!

I think the concave design looks better.

 

[Steve Maskery]

I note that you have very sensibly put the curve on the edge which doesn't need lots of nicely fitted mortise and tenon joints!

I think the concave design looks better.

I am increasingly enjoying not deliberately making life any more difficult than it needs to be.
(Although I do draw the line at just buying a bed frame from the blue-and-yellow shop - I had to steel myself to buy the slatted base, but life is too short to be making sprung slats).

 

[AndyT]

That makes sense to me Steve.

Buying those slats is exactly what I would have done if I hadn't already had a set of slats from our old bed that I could reuse. Last time I checked, Ikea's offering was cheaper than buying the raw materials.

 

[Steve Maskery]

I note that you have very sensibly put the curve on the edge which doesn't need lots of nicely fitted mortise and tenon joints!

When I was modelling it up, I do distinctly remember thinking, "There is no way I am going to do an Andy!"

 

[Cabinetman]

Well I still like contrasting timbers Steve, I love pale timber like Maple or Sycamore, maybe not against a brown wood like Mahogany but certainly it looks good with Oak, another way I’ve done it is with Brown Oak panels in Oak frames.
Maybe I’m showing my age?

 

[Steve Maskery]

If it seems like this is dragging on, you would be right. Eyes, cars, dishwashers house-martins and an impending visit of an In-Law, whom I have met only once and has dementia (she's not coming for dinner, she's coming for a fortnight - Yikes!) - all causing aggro and delay.

I have, however, made some progress in the last couple of days. This is it.



This is a lot of very boring stock preparation. But I now have all the slats cut to width, thicknessed to 12mm and sanded to P120. I've not yet cut them to length, but they are good. Ish. One or two of them have a fairly gash figure to them. One looks more like beech than oak, a bit of spalting, rather bland grain.

I've decided that I am going for the two-tone look, light for the slats, dark for the frame. If the light slats look a bit naff, I'll simply refinish them the same as the rest of the bed.

I've also cut the stock for the short rails, but not yet cut the curves.

It's exhausting working in this heat

S

 

[Steve Maskery]

A bit more done today.
Getting the width right is important, as I already have the slatted base and mattress. The base is 1400mm, or rather it is 2x700, a fact that I didn'tt appreciate when I ordered it. No matter, but it does mean that the bed will need a central spine.
So let's say that I need the 1400mm, plus a bit of clearance, say 5mm. But when the two sides are butted up, I already have 55mm, so the rails need to be 1350mm long.
So having cut them to length it is time to mark out the curve. I already have a video on how to mark out long shallow curves when I know only the cord and the bulge - 1350 and 40.mm respectively. That gives a radius of about 5.7m - that would be one helluva trammel.
But it's easy with a couple of sticks. Simply let them be in contact with each end of the arc and cross at the bulge point. Glue them together.


Trim off the excess at the crossover:

Then run it against the blocks with a pncil in a notch at the crossover point. One perfect circular arc.


I did have to shorten one arm by quite some length because the walls of my workshop got in the way, but I managed.
I would have carried on and got them bandsawn, but eyes went AWOL again. Sigh.

If you need more detail of the technique, there is a YT here:

S