I decided to document this project because I thought it might be interesting to some of my friends who may not know much about furniture making. There's more to it than many people realize, so hopefully this will entertain you, and maybe show you a few things you didn't know.
This project is inspired by a bed designed by Greene & Greene for the Gamble house in Pasedena:
Greene & Greene were two brothers who became fairly famous architects in Southern California. They blended the arts & crafts style with Japanese woodworking tradition. You don't see many commercially made pieces in the Greene & Greene style because the details and joinery are somewhat complex and time consuming to build, but for that same reason, many woodworkers are drawn to it.
One of the first challenges in this project is translating the design from a twin bed to a king. The original Greene & Greene design was perfectly proportioned, and if we simply widen everything, it will look ridiculous. In fact, I once saw some photos of a queen bed someone had built by stretching this twin design until it was wide enough for a queen mattress, and it lost all sense of balance and proportion. It was like when you watch a full-screen movie, but you stretch it out to the width of your widescreen TV, and all of the characters are short and fat and their cars all look like some giant person stepped on them. We can't have that. On the other hand, we also can't turn the twin bed into a king simply by increasing all of the dimensions (horizontal and vertical), or we'll have a footboard that stands 6 feet high, a headboard that goes through the ceiling, and a mattress so high you need a ladder to get into bed. The challenge is to widen the bed, keep it about the same height, but adjust the pieces and details in a way that maintains the overall balance and proportion. Sadly, I'm not that talented. But happily, I know people who are. Which is just as good, really. And with the help of their artistic flair, voila, I've now got a design for a king size bed that would make the Greene brothers proud. (I'm not going to post the drawings; you'll just have to keep reading this blog and await the finished product if you want to see how it looks in the end.)
And so, design in hand, we start milling lumber. We're building this bed out of African Mahogany, which we buy in large, rough-sawn planks. This one is about 13" wide by 10 feet long by 2" thick. We started with many boards like this (some wider).
Here are the top rails for the headboard and footboard:
The first step is to turn big boards into smaller (but still pretty large) boards. These will be the legs for the headboard and footboard:
Here are the top rails for the headboard and footboard:
"Rough-sawn" lumber is lumber that comes straight off the huge bandsaw they use at the sawmill to slice trees into boards. It shows bandsaw marks and is nothing close to flat. There are lots of splinters on it. For a project like this bed, it will take dozens of hours to mill the rough-sawn lumber into flat, square, pretty boards that are dimensioned and ready for joinery. You can buy pre-milled lumber, but by the time the lumber moves from the sawmill to the lumberyard, sits at the lumberyard for weeks, then moves to your shop, it goes through so many humidity changes that it will be warped and twisted. We need the lumber to be perfectly flat and square. So we mill it ourselves. Also, this allows Jill to brag about how she spent her Christmas vacation muscling large planks of mahogany over our 12" jointer. Which makes her pretty much the coolest mom in town.
Speaking of the 12" jointer, this project is testing the limits of our tools. That doesn't happen often. That jointer is 12" wide and over seven feet long. It's a much bigger jointer than any sane person has in their garage. In the photo above, Jill is jointing a board that is 3' long, 4-1/2" wide, and 2" thick, and the jointer makes that board look like a little toy. But some of the larger boards for this project are a real challenge, even on a jointer this large. We had to do some woodworking gymnastics to make the huge boards work on these fairly substantial tools. Beds are big. King sized beds are really big. As another example, here's a picture of my clamp rack:
It's difficult to see in the picture, but this rack is double-sided -- there's a wall of clamps on the side facing us, and another wall of clamps on the opposite side. But with all those clamps, I don't have a single clamp that will be long enough to clamp up this bed when we're ready to glue it up. Darn. I guess that means I'll have to buy some more clamps. Which is the purpose of having woodworking tools -- so you can take on projects that give you an excuse to buy more woodworking tools.
Back to the jointer. The real purpose of the jointer is to make one face of the board perfectly flat, and one edge of the board perfectly flat and perfectly square to the face. When the face of a board is perfectly flat, we say that the face is "true." When the edge of a board is square to the face, we say that it is "tried." When the face is flat and the edge is flat and square, we say that the board is "tried and true." And that's the etymology of the phrase "tried and true." See, I told you that you would learn something reading this blog.
Once we are finished at the jointer, we move to the planer. The purpose of the planer is to make the unjointed face of the board perfectly flat and parallel to the jointed face, and to thickness the board. We finished planing the top rails for the headboard and footboard just before we closed up the shop for dinner.
In this next photo, look carefully at the grain lines going along the length of the two boards. See how the grain curves up and down, as if the grain has kind of a hump in the middle of each board? It's difficult to see while the wood is still raw, but it is definitely visible, and it will be much more pronounced once we apply a finish.
One of the artistic aspects of woodworking is finding boards, and sections of boards, that have grain and color that will complement the structure of the finished piece. If you look in the top photo at the original Gamble house bed, you'll see that the top rails on the footboard and headboard have a graceful arc, rising up to a slight crest in the middle. That arc is a critical part of the design -- go back and look at that picture again, and imagine how different the bed would look if those top rails were just straight boards with no arc. When you have a design element like that arc that is so essential, you want the grain of the wood to accentuate the arc.These boards do that, because the arc of the grain generally follows the arc of the top rail. Looking again at the two boards in the photo immediately above, also notice how the grain is very similar from one board to the other. This is because they were cut from the same board (so they were right next to each other in the tree). As a result, the grain in the top rail of the headboard will match the grain in the top rail of the footboard. Most people will never consciously notice that the grain follows the arc, or that the footboard grain matches the headboard grain. But at a subconscious level, your brain picks up all of this. And these details are what separate a piece of art from a construction project.
So, as we were picking out boards for the top rails, we looked for boards that had this type of grain pattern. In a perfect world, we would have found grain that curved more gradually, but you don't get to tell the wood what grain to have. It can be difficult to find a board that is at least 12" wide (so that you have enough material to get two top rails), seven feet long, and 2" thick, plus have exactly the grain pattern you are looking for. I consider us very lucky to have found this type of arc in a board large enough to make our rails. In fact, in the original Greene & Greene Gamble house bed, the grain in the headboard top rail and footboard top rail match almost perfectly, and they were both clearly cut from the same board; however, the grain does not arch, but rather slants upward and to the right throughout the boards. So the guys who built that bed (the Hall brothers, who are fairly famous woodworkers from the early 1900s) were thinking the same thing I was thinking, but they weren't lucky enough to find a board with such a cool arcing grain pattern.
Enough bragging about the cool boards we found. The other part of the project we started today was creating approximately one boatload of jigs and templates. Take a careful look at that first picture of the Gamble bed, and notice that there are very few 90 degree angles. There are only eight perfectly square boards on the entire bed (two of which are the side rails). Everything else has angles, curves, multiple curves, cloud lifts, and all sorts of weird things. Each of which requires a jig or a template, or both. We'll probably spend as much time making templates and jigs as we spend building the bed itself.
The first step of template making is to make a full-scale drawing on poster board (more precisely, on several pieces of posterboard taped together, because most of the pieces on this bed are very large). There are lots of weird curves and angles in this bed, so just drawing it up takes a lot of time. I spent about three hours making full-scale drawings of the legs and top rails. Unfortunately, the pencil lines don't show up at all in my photos, but you can see three poster boards taped together to give me something long enough to draw some of the large pieces we're dealing with.
Tomorrow, I'll pick up some MDF and transfer the poster-board drawings to the MDF for templates. More pictures to follow.
It's going to take a while before any of this starts looking like a bed. The typical woodworking experience is that about 50 percent of the time is spent milling and cutting joinery, then 10% is spent making cool details and gluing it all up (which is when it starts looking like the thing it's supposed to be), and then the other 40% of the time is spent sanding and applying the finish, and wishing you were done already so you can move onto the next project.
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