Bed Design

[wobblycogs]

Hi everyone, my much better half would like me to make a bed in the next month or two so I rattled out a design over the weekend. As I've not done much wood butchering I thought I'd get a little feed back before I put saw to wood.

The SU file for the design can be downloaded from here http://www.crazysquirrel.com/images/woodwork/bed.skp but here's a piccy as well

To give you an idea of scale the uprights are 90x90mm. The model has an oak applied to it but I plan on building the bed from pine (I happened to have oak in the materials library). The panelling is 8mm T&G from B&Q. The mattress hides it in the picture but I have two head to foot support rails 75mm deep - I'm guessing this will be enough can anyone confirm this? The head and foot boards will be M&Ted together with the long rails connected by bolts (to be kindly supplied by Brad/Dan). The support rails will sit in joist hangers and I might bolt through them to provide a little more resistance to movement.

It there anything you think I've missed? Anything that looks stupendously difficult for a beginner? I've never made a curved piece of wood before so that will, I think, be my challenge here but I've a few ideas on how I will tackle it.

As an aside, I wanted to upload the model to the Google 3D warehouse but I can't sign in thought SketchUp. The sign in page just sits there blank ticking ever couple of seconds which I assume is a failed redirect. Anyone else get this? Google has a couple of posts about it but no one found a solution.

 

[OPJ]

Only thing I'm wondering is whether the long side rails need to be a bit deeper; perhaps closer to 120mm wide?

You'll want to make an accurate MDF template of the finished shape of the curved rails, so that you can run a bearing-guided router cutter against that to get the finished shape. I guess it's not critical that the curves are perfectly parallel, only that they look right... Assuming the T&G boards are fitting in to a groove, that should make things easier as well.

 

[wobblycogs]

Cheers, I was thinking about the side rails last night they do look a little weedy. I think I'll go with your suggestion of 120mm.

The T&G boarding will be in a groove. I've made a few doors and such like in this way and I find it adds great ridigity even though the boards are free floating. To date I've always cut the groove with a straight 8mm router bit plunged into the rail. Presumably for the curve though I'm going to have to use a groover like this http://www.wealdentool.com/acatalog/Online_Catalogue_Groover_134.html. Would you suggest going for an 8mm groover or a smaller one (say 4mm) and completing the cut in two passes? Also standard or heavy duty groover? It's only for hobby use but I could see it being used fairly often. This looks like quite a large cutter, is is safe to use free hand as I don't currently have a router table?

Thanks for your help.

 

[oddsocks]

Wobblycogs, make sure that the slatted base is suitably spaced for your mattress type - as an example I built a bed about 6 years ago and used these slats http://www.woodfit.com/index.php?cPath=117_35&Name=Bed+Fittings spaced at 50mm intervals. Within 5 years the pocket sprung mattress had failed (because it was a '2000 spring' mattress the springs were smaller than the gaps). I recently changed the mattress and the supplier said (without prompting) that the air gap between slats for that pocket sprung mattress should be no more than 28mm! In my case I bought another 12 (2 x 6) of the slats and rubber fittings....these are also far more comfortable than flat pine slats (work out the cost per night and its worth it!). If you have the cheaper (opencoil) type mattress then slats can be up to about 60mm spacing as the springs are all held together.

I had a queensize bed (6ft wide) so made the slat bases as 2 x drop in frames each just under 3ft wide each- this also give bounce and roll independance

Dave

 

[Chris Knight]

Slotting cutters are very fast and efficient compared with straight cutters and an 8mm cutter will be fine although I would use a suitable bearing to take two passes just to be on the safe side.

 

[wobblycogs]

Thanks for the advice guys.

We have one of those fancy foam matresses (very comfy but a bit hot in the summer, great in winter when you have no heating though!) so I'll go and look up whether the base should even be slatted.

Time to get down to Axminster and buy some more toys me thinks...