Real life furniture from 3D
polycounter lvl 19
I'm took a six week hiatus from my house to design and build a bedframe. I wanted something arts and crafts that would fit in my 1950s farmhouse, so nothing too fancy but also I did not want to make boring. I had some extra pieces of large pine I wanted to use as the feet and main support beams, and started with them as is to create the design.
Here are the extra chunks I started with. I needed to reinforce the top floor and used these as columns, 6x6s. They only came in one length and I kept the extra parts for this project. My first task was to dimension them (they had lots of twisting) and take out the strip with cracks using my table saw and then gluing in an insert.
The little ducklings all lined up
Testing the fit of one of the beams. I kept the feet totally square until all mortises were cut and tested, then shaped them into their final form.
Footboard assembled.
Testing the fit of the headboard parts. The darker wood was salvaged from the farmhouse interior. I had to replace a few structural parts with stronger newer wood, and I saved the older to reuse. It's also pine, from the 1940s, and had "made in the USA" stamped on many pieces, despite being in Kópavogur Iceland. I think they might have bought a Sears kit house or possibly just a pile of wood from the USA and had it shipped over.
Found a nice straight toothed 8 tpi saw for ripping, worked so much better than my cross cut saws.
The panels are made from old floorboards. I'm replacing all the pine tongue and groove floor with cherry tree and beech. Some rooms are already done, which was an entire project on it's own, sistering all support beams while removing the bowing to get flat floors. I also had to add the tongue and groove to my new ones myself with a table router.
The bed disassembles in four parts, footboard, headboard, and side beams. Here is the headboard and side beams (main board of the side beam is 3x9)
And the final bed test assembled before I take it apart again to paint with a semi transparent white that shows the wood grain.
The bed holds a king sized mattress, 180x200, and the internal mounting hardware for the mattresses I got from Ikea, by ordering from the extra parts email service. It will have two metal rails with three rows of curved ribs. I did not want a central foot in the middle like many designs call for.
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Not really, this went incredibly smoothly, I accredit it to all the previous woodworking. If I could change anything, it would be to give myself more time for more complicated designs or decorations. I would have liked the time to do routed engravings along the long rails, but I already spent too long.