Milling and template making

+Jill Van Patten and I spent some more time in the shop, right up until Christmas Eve dinner.

First, we continued milling (and milling and milling) lumber.  Here are a couple gratuitous shots of me at the planer:

Now, I know what you're thinking:  Where can someone get a sexy leather apron like that?  Well, seriously, you can't just expect me to throw information like that out there.  If word gets out, then pretty soon everyone would be wearing one, and next thing you know it wouldn't be cool anymore.  It would be that whole star-bellied sneetch thing all over again.

We've now milled up all the lumber for the legs and top rails, and we'll save the other parts for later.  And not just because I have a short attention span.  In the past, I've tried milling up all the lumber for a project at once.  Bad things happen.  Sooner or later, you get confused about which lumber was supposed to be for which part, and then suddenly you don't have the right lumber for all the parts and you have to go back and mill up a bunch of lumber again.  So it's best to build a few parts at a time.  Plus, there's the whole ADD issue.

And so we moved on to template making.  Jill was not thrilled about making templates.  I can understand why.  You spend a lot of time in the shop and never seem to make progress on building the actual bed.  But building good templates are critical when you have pieces that have all these weird shapes.  There's no way to build multiple pieces that match if you don't have a template to follow.  The templates begin with drawing parts on poster board (or on several poster boards taped together because they don't make poster board in pieces as big as a king size bed).  The drawings have to be perfect, because the template will never be any better than the drawings.  Then, you cut out the drawing with an xacto knife and trace your poster-board template onto some 3/4" MDF. It's not rocket science, but it does have to be perfect.

Once the template is traced onto the MDF, we cut it out with a bandsaw.  Now comes the monotonous part.  The bandsaw does not leave an accurate or fine edge, so we have to turn those rough edges into perfectly straight edges.  We do that by taking a straight piece of MDF and attaching it to our template with the straight edge where our finished line should go, using double-stick tape.  Then we use a flush-trim bit in our router table to get a perfectly straight line on the template.

This takes a long time because there are many short, straight edges on these templates that are connected by weird curves and things.  And we have to route each straight edge one at a time.

Once the straight edges are done, it's on to the curves.  This is where the old-fashioned hand tools come in:  rasps and files, taking a smidgen at a time until the curve is perfect.  Here are some of the final templates (or mostly final, anyway):

Next step, cutting real wood!