Our daughter Lauren is starting to outgrow her crib. She can climb into it by herself and if she thought about it she could climb out - which would no doubt end in a fall. So it's time she moves into a big girl bed.
I built a bunk bed for Joshua and want to do the same thing for Lauren. I built his bed out of construction lumber following a plan from Canadian Home Workshop. After struggling with that construction lumber I decided I would never do that again. As I wrote earlier, I ended up buying 100 board feet of curly maple from my wood guy.
Even before I finalized the design of the bed, I knew that my first task would be to build up some posts for the foot board of the bed. That's the first thing I started with.
This is when I found out how not fun it is to work with this curly maple. Depending on the grain of the wood, I found both the jointer and the planer take big gouges out of the wood. I had to use the drum sander to clean up all of the pieces for the legs. Since the drum sander removes material very slowly this was very time-consuming. Also the kiln dried lumber I was working with was very reactionary - every piece I cut would warp and twist. It was very aggravating to put it mildly. I'm assuming that the guy who put it in the kiln dried it too quickly. I will not be buying KD wood from him again.
I tried a couple of test pieces before I built the real things. I first tried cutting 45 degree miters on the edges of the boards to glue up, but they were tricky to line up for gluing. I next looked into buying a lock-miter bit, but those seemed too expensive for this one use. I ended up cutting a 7/8" rabbet on the edge of each board, leaving 1/8" of material on the face, then gluing them together. After rounding over the edge with a 1/4" round over bit they look very solid.
The first post I glued all four sides together at once. I thought I had enough clamps and had all the joints tight but alas I did not. After unclamping I found that a few of the joints were very visible.
I built a bunk bed for Joshua and want to do the same thing for Lauren. I built his bed out of construction lumber following a plan from Canadian Home Workshop. After struggling with that construction lumber I decided I would never do that again. As I wrote earlier, I ended up buying 100 board feet of curly maple from my wood guy.
Even before I finalized the design of the bed, I knew that my first task would be to build up some posts for the foot board of the bed. That's the first thing I started with.
This is when I found out how not fun it is to work with this curly maple. Depending on the grain of the wood, I found both the jointer and the planer take big gouges out of the wood. I had to use the drum sander to clean up all of the pieces for the legs. Since the drum sander removes material very slowly this was very time-consuming. Also the kiln dried lumber I was working with was very reactionary - every piece I cut would warp and twist. It was very aggravating to put it mildly. I'm assuming that the guy who put it in the kiln dried it too quickly. I will not be buying KD wood from him again.
I tried a couple of test pieces before I built the real things. I first tried cutting 45 degree miters on the edges of the boards to glue up, but they were tricky to line up for gluing. I next looked into buying a lock-miter bit, but those seemed too expensive for this one use. I ended up cutting a 7/8" rabbet on the edge of each board, leaving 1/8" of material on the face, then gluing them together. After rounding over the edge with a 1/4" round over bit they look very solid.
The first post I glued all four sides together at once. I thought I had enough clamps and had all the joints tight but alas I did not. After unclamping I found that a few of the joints were very visible.
For the next post I glued up two pieces at a time, using some simple cauls to maintain pressure across the entire joint.
After the two pairs were dry I glued them up with more clamps and cauls. The second post came out much better.
Here's a sketchup picture of the joinery I used.
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