Bunk Beds - Take Two

As regular readers will know, I recently posted an article on building a set of bunk beds for our small cabin.  We wanted to be able to accommodate four people staying in the cabin overnight, so we needed a second set.  Given the small size of the cabin, the second set would need some small design changes to fit in the space remaining.  I took my first sketchup model and basically trimmed it down where I could.

Since I already covered the build details on the first bed in full in my previous article, I'm going to just focus on the things I did differently for the second set.

There were a few differences in terms of length.  I made the long and short rails a bit shorter, and the posts just a bit taller.  I also thinned the posts down from about 3 1/2 inches square to 2 3/4 inches square.  Once that was done, it made all the "2 by" material that the rails are made out of look a bit too beefy, so I thinned them down to 1 1/4 inches thick.  I correspondingly adjusted the mortise and tenon widths down by the same 1/4 inch to 3/4 of an inch.

The biggest design change I made on the second set of beds was to replace the draw bolt joinery on the disassemble-able joints between the long rails and the end ladder assemblies with bedlocks I bought from Lee Valley.

All my rails and posts were prepared and the mortise and tenon joints cut in the same manner as the first bed, the main difference being that there are no mortise and tenons connecting the long rails to the end ladder assemblies.  Here is how I installed the bedlocks that replaced them:

I started by making layout marks with a marking gauge on the end of a long rail for the mortise to hold the male (hooked) section of the bedlock.

 

I deepened my marks a bit with a knife, being careful to stay on the line.

I then clamped some scrap to the sides to provide a wider base for my router base to ride on.

I set the depth of my router bit's cut to the thickness of the bedlock, then carefully freehand routed away the waste.

The deep knife lines I made allowed this to work well.  As you approach the knife line slowly and carefully with the router, the guide line encourages the wood to the waste side to sheer off, and the wood on the keep side of the line to stay put.

I squared up the ends with my chisel and mallet, bevel down.

I was very happy with the finished product.

Then the bedlocks are screwed in place with some good quality 2 1/2 inch long wood screws.

 Installing the female piece of the bedlock in the post begins in the same way, with the marking gauge and knife.

I then use my router freehand to remove most of the waste.

I square up the corners this time with my router plane.

The main body of the female section of the bedlock sits in a mortise, but it also requires two additional mortises for the hooks to slip into when the joint is assembled.  I mark these by placing the bedlock in its mortise and tracing the locations for the hook mortises.

 

Since these mortises were small, I decided to chop them out with a chisel and mallet.

They're not super clean, but it hardly matters as long as they function.

The new bed is the one on the right in these pictures

Overall, I am happy with the new design.  The slightly smaller dimensions on the pieces made the bed lighter and easier to transport.  Also, the bedlocks worked out well.  They didn't save me any money,  nor time to install them, but when it came time to finally assemble the whole bed they really made it easier.  If I had to make another set, I would definitely go with the bedlocks just for the easier assembly.  Trying to align all those drawbolted mortise and tenons on final assembly on the older set is really a chore.

Tails and Pins (Odds and Ends)

I have been making several hand cut dovetailed items over the past couple of months.  First, some small shelves for the cabin:

These are meant to hang under an existing shelf and attach to wooden shelf brackets like this:

I also made 3 storage boxes from plywood to haul necessities back and forth to the cabin in:

I don't know about you, but I never seem to have enough places to put hardware.  So I made these two little screw caddies:

And here is my first attempt at half-blind dovetails on an upcoming project - a bookcase for the cabin.

For the cabin bookcase glue up, I had to have 3 new clamps.  So I made a funky little clamp rack to store them on that fit into the little bit of space I had left.  It attaches to the wooden shelf brackets with the screws you can see in the front, as well as two more pocket hole screws in the rear.

Also on the shop organization and storage front, I cleaned up a really messy corner where I had been stockpiling metal.  Or at least that was the original idea, but lots of wood ended up in the pile as well so I was guaranteed to never be able to find what I needed in there.  So I set up this little system for storing and organizing the metal.  It's just a little box made from scrap spruce, joined with rabbets and brads at the corners.  There are removable 1/4 inch plywood dividers installed in dadoes.  The upper divider is just a 2 x 4 ripped in half with some holes drilled in it to match the dividers in the lower box.  Dowels are inserted in the holes to correspond to the divider settings in the lower unit.

The wood and other junk that was in the pile was sorted, and some thrown away.  I installed a small shelf on a the bottom section of my lumber rack, as seen in this picture, to hold short stock I'm saving.  You can see the upper section is still in major need of some cleanup.

Bunk Beds

We have a tiny cabin (165 sq ft) on a piece of rural property that my family owns.  We like to visit there on the weekends, and we hope to eventually build a house and move to the property.  We visited the cabin for some time without any beds in the cabin.  We slept on air mattresses, which is fine for a short while but becomes inconvenient and uncomfortable after a while.  So I decided to build us some bunk beds which could stay at the cabin permanently.  I wanted these to be as inexpensive as possible, but nice enough quality to last a lifetime.  I spent some time designing these in sketchup to conform to the space we had available.

I had seen on an unrelated trip to Lowes that they were selling untreated douglas fir 4x4s.  I snagged 4 of these for the posts.  These were not cheap, at about $10 each.  The rest of the beds is built entirely out of construction grade spruce 2x6s and 2x4s.  The 4x4s were fairly rough when I got them home, with lots of planer marks and some tear out from the planer at the mill where they were originally cut.  So I started out by planing them nice and smooth with my Stanley #4 plane.

 

Next I turned my attention to making mortises - MANY mortises (32 total).  I made these in the same fashion as I usually do, first making all the layout marks, then drilling out the waste with a forstner bit at the drill press, and finally squaring up the mortises with chisels.

 

I worked through these steps a post at a time, first planing it smooth with the handplane, then making the mortises just to break up the repetitive work.

With all the mortises made, I then turned my attention to making the numerous rails that made up the rest of the frame.  These were a little rough to begin with as well, so I started by running all the 2x6 and 2x4 stock through my thickness planer.  I only took off maybe 1/16 of an inch total, just enough to smooth them out a bit on the faces and make them all the same thickness so that the tenons come out more consistent.

Then I set up the table saw to begin working on the tenons.  All the tenons are the same 1 inch thickness and 1 inch length, and all the shoulder cuts are the same depth, so I only need to get the saw set up correctly and then run them all through.  For smaller tenons, sometimes I either nibble all the waste away at the tablesaw, or cut the tenons in two passes, one horizontal and one vertical.  Since these pieces were so long and hard to control, I opted to only make the shoulder cuts and one additional set of cuts halfway out the length of the tenon just as a depth guide.

Then I pare each tenon down with chisels.

As I work on each tenon, I test fit it in the specific mortise it corresponds to in the posts.  After paring with the chisels, I do any fine thickness adjustments with an old wooden bodied rabbet plane I bought on ebay a while back.  It turns out to be perfect for this task.

Here I have one of the end ladder assemblies test assembled to check for any problems.  You can see that I have not yet cut the posts to length, so they are extending way beyond the top rail.

Most of the rails need some planing on the edges as well to match the smooth faces I made using the thickness planer.

There was a LOT of hand planing on this project, and after a while I started losing tools in the shavings piles.

After much work, all the mortises and tenons made and fitted, it was time to start working on the draw bolt system that would hold the long rails to the end ladder assemblies when it is all put together.  I started by laying out positions for the holes to be drilled through the posts and into the mortises.  Then I first drilled the counterbores for the heads of the bolts to sit in with a forstner bit.

Then I drill the smaller hole for the shank of the bolt.

Here it is coming through to the bottom of the mortise.

Then I decided I should assemble each joint in order to use the hole in the post to guide the drilling into the tenon and rail. 

This sounded better in theory than it turned out to be in practice.  Probably a better strategy would have been to assemble the joint and use the post hole as a guide to just drill in 1/8 of an inch or so to mark the hole placement, then disassemble and drill the tenon hole to depth so you could ensure the hole was more square to the workpiece.  The tenon holes on some of my joints ended up not straight and square to the rails, but they were definitely close enough to work.

Then a hole is drilled from the inside face of the rail to connect to the hole running through the tenon.  This is how you will get the nut onto the bolt when assembling the beds.  This is drilled with a forstner bit and then the end closest to the tenon is chiseled square, making a D shape.  The flat back edge of the hole is to give the nut and washer a flat surface to bear against.  You can see the finished D shape in a later picture, this is just the initial hole.

The long rails now need cleats installed on them which will hold the plywood that supports the mattresses.  These are ripped from spruce 2x4s.

And installed with glue and screws.

You can see that D shaped hole a bit better in the above pic.

Once all these were done, hours upon hours of sanding followed.  I also routed roundovers on all the pieces.  Then with all the pieces sanded and cleaned, it was time to clean up my disaster of a shop so I could start finishing.

Remember all that hand planing?

Because of the sheer scale of surface area to be finished, I elected to spray finish this project.  I started by taping off all the tenons to protect them from overspray.

I also taped over the mortise holes, and trimmed the tape to just the area that would be covered by the shoulders of the tenons.

With everything taped, I had to clear off every surface in the shop to hold all the pieces while they were drying.

Table saw included...

And finally, I ran out of space and had to cobble together some extra...

Then the finishing began.  I chose Deft waterbased acrylic for this project.  It's always a little risky to use a finish you're not familiar with for such a big project, but it's not that different from what I usually use.

Here is my really awesome high tech spray booth.

I go through the full spray schedule over several days.  I spray one coat, then sand out the raised grain, then spray two more coats.  I find I can only spray the faces when they are laying horizontal to avoid runs, so a full coat on a piece requires two separate rounds of finishing.  So the finishing, as usual, turns out to be a huge undertaking.

Once that is complete, it's time to remove the tape on the tenons, and glue up the end ladder assemblies for good.  I ran into a near disaster when it turned out my 4 foot pipe clamps wouldn't actually open to 4 feet.  How many times have we all read and heard to do a dry run on these big assemblies to avoid this kind of problem?  Yet I did not, so the first ladder assembly was pretty risky.  For the second one, I got longer pieces of pipe to allow the clamps to open wide enough.  I took a picture of the more successful second round, of course.

Another last-minute surprise was that the cleats on the ladder side rails interfered with the cleats on the long rails, preventing full assembly.  Luckily this was easily remedied by cutting a notch with a hand saw and chisel.

After some considerable fiddling with installing the bolts for the draw bolt system, I completed the finished test assembly and cut the plywood mattress supports to fit the finished dimensions.  Then I threw on the mattresses, still in their packaging, to get a view of the finished product in my living room.

And here is the finished product in the cabin.