Headboard dry-fit! And a walk-through of making mortises for ebony plugs.

You gotta love a day like today!

At long last, we finished squaring up the mortises for the spindles, carefully planed the spindles to fit, and finished cutting the mortises on the top rail for the ebony plugs.  Finally, we can dry-fit the parts and see how it will look.  ("Dry fitting" means assembling everything without glue, so that you can test everything out.)  Here's how the headboard looks:

And here it is next to Jill, because everything looks better next to Jill:

This is still a long way from a finished product.  We have not yet cut the profile on the top of the upper rail, rounded over any edges, installed any ebony plugs, sanded anything, applied a finish, etc.  But this gives you a rough idea of how it will all fit together.

Speaking of all those details to come, here is my process for cutting the mortises for the ebony plugs.  Keep in mind that there are 126 of these on the bed.  And they each take a bit of time.

First, We have to lay out the mortise. Remember how the top edge of the top rail is still flat?  We can use that flat edge as a reference to ensure the mortises are not crooked.

Next, I set a combination square to that flat edge of the rail, and adjust the ruler so that its edge is at the top of the mortise.

I set a mortising chisel flat against the edge of the ruler, right on the square we previously laid out.  I hammer the mortising chisel into the mahogany.

I run a 3/16" drill bit through the chisel and drill a hole in the center of our mortise.

Next, I set a very sharp chisel against each edge of the mortise and tap to sever the wood fibers.

I clean out the waste, and we have a lovely mortise, ready to accept an ebony plug:

One down, 125 to go!

Template routing

Today we shaped the top portion of the lower rail using the same template technique we used to shape the other pieces.  I documented the process on this one more thoroughly to show you how we do template routing.

First, we affix the template to the workpiece.  We screw it to the rail in spots that will later be covered by ebony plugs.  We have to be precise about where we drill the holes so that we don't have to put plugs where we don't want them.

The lines in the picture above show where the spindles will line up, and where each ebony plug needs to line up in order to be centered on the spindle.  We then center the screwhole on the plug lines, 1/2" from the edge of the template.  That's exactly where we will put the plugs, so the screwhole will be hidden.

We then flip the piece over, so the template is on the bottom, and take it to the router table.  The router has a flush trim bit, which consists of a bearing on the bottom and a cutter on the top.

The bearing rides against the template, and the cutter cuts the workpiece flush with the template.  Since our workpiece here is 1-1/2" thick, that's too much for the bit to take in one pass.  So we start by trimming the lower half of the workpiece:

Then we remove the template, and we have a rail that is halfway there.

Next, we take the workpiece back to the router table.  We use the flush trim bit again, this time with the bearing riding on the surface that we previously routed, and the bit cuts away the rest of the material flush with the routed surface.

And now the top of the rail is exactly the same shape as our template.

It's hardly pretty at this point.  We'll need to cut the joinery for the spindles, sand it, round over the edges, cut the mortises for the plugs, and inlay the ebony plugs.  But it's starting to look more like the overall shape that the bed will have when finished.  Here's a random picture of the top rail connected to the uppermost bottom rail with the middle two spindles in place:

From that point, we worked on some tasks that I've previously shown -- we squared the corners on about half of the mortises, but still have half to go tomorrow.  I also cut the mortises for about 2/3 of the ebony plugs that go on the top rail.  I trimmed the veneered panel and spindles to their final lengths.

When I was trimming the pieces to length, I discovered that somehow this headboard is 1/2" shorter than I had intended.  I'm not sure why.  I went back over all of the dimensions, and I couldn't find my mistake anywhere.  The good news is that it really doesn't matter.  Mistakes that don't make any difference are my favorite kind.

Absent any major missteps, tomorrow we should be able to dry-fit the headboard.  You'll finally get a rough sense of what this is going to look like!

It's starting to look like a headboard.

Jill and I had a great weekend in the shop.  Not as many hours as we would have liked, though -- only a few hours yesterday, and about 4 hours today.  But I'm pleased with what we accomplished.

Jill squared up the corners on our mortises in the headboard top rail.  It's a bit tricky, because any small error will leave a gap.  Jill was frustrated at first because they weren't coming out perfect, and when I showed her how to do it so there's no gap, I think I saw a few tears.  I felt bad for her, but I'm glad she is so focused on getting everything perfect.  She got the hang of it soon enough, and most all of them came out without any visible gap.  The couple that have a small gap are easily repairable.

We milled up the spindles.  In fact, we got to mill them several times.  The first time, I made them too small.  DOH!  So I milled them again, and this time they twisted and warped severely by the time we got them finished.  All wood warps and twists a bit when you mill it, and so we take precautions to account for that and ensure that the final product is flat and square.  But this set of spindles warped and twisted so badly that there was no rescuing it.  So I milled them again, and this time I went extreme in my precautions.  I started by milling each spindle 1/2" oversize in all directions.  Then I planed them a bit, and jointed them again, then planed them again.  I still had a little warp in one piece, but it won't affect anything and it won't be noticeable.
Once we milled the pieces, I used a handplane to make each one fit perfectly in the mortises Jill cut.  And here is the finished product, which each spindle sitting about 3/8" deep in it's mortise.

Not too shabby.  When they are cut this precisely, it doesn't look like the spindle sits in a mortise -- it looks like it is sitting flush on the rail, which is the look we want.  There are a couple rails that have a tiny gap, but we'll fill the gaps with a little sawdust and glue and they won't be noticed.  Of course, all of those pencil lines will be gone, and all that remains will be perfect, gapless joints.

We have not yet cut the profile for what will be the top of the top rail (which is on the bottom in these pictures).  Generally speaking, we always cut joinery before we cut profiles, because it's much easier to get the joinery right on flat wood than on curved wood.  In the below picture, for example, you can see the blue marker line on the rail, which represents the final profile on the top side of the rail.  If we had cut that already, it would be difficult to work with this piece.  Right now, the flat side sits easily on the bench while we work on the rail.  The flat side also gives me a straight edge which I can use to register my cuts on the multi-router.  This would be next to impossible if I had already cut that profile.  I did, of course, profile the edge that mates to the spindles, because I have to get my mortises to the correct depth, and the depth needs to register from the final profile.

Next, we had to cut a dado in the rail to accept our veneered panel.  This was really tricky.  The spindles on each side of the panel have a dado that the panel slides into, and the dado in the rail has to line up dead-on exact with the dados in the spindles, or there will be gaps.  I'm happy with how it came out.  So you have a little context, the following pictures are pictures of the top section of the headboard upside-down.  (If that's difficult to perceive, hold your monitor upside-down, and now you will be looking at the top half of the headboard.)

We had a bit of a safety adventure cutting the dado for the veneered panel.  When I finished making one of the cuts, we turned the router off, and Jill started vacuuming out some of the sawdust with our ShopVac.  The router was still spinning down, and she bumped the vacuum hose into the router bit.  The router bit grabbed the vacuum hose and gave it a good yank, and it freaked Jill out (as it should).  She didn't get hurt, but it gave her a scare.  And it gave me a scare too.  Good will come of this, though.  I'm a safety nut in the shop, and over the past few weeks, I have sometimes been frustrated that Jill doesn't have enough respect for the danger that these tools present.  I don't think she appreciates just how easily they hurt you if you aren't being careful.  One rule I follow is that when I turn off a tool, I stand there and watch the blade or bit until it stops turning, and I don't do anything until then.  That rule ensures that I am aware of whether the blade is still spinning, and that I don't do what Jill did today -- start sticking my hand where it doesn't belong when a sharp blade is still spinning.  Jill did the same thing at the tablesaw last week -- after I made a cut and turned off the saw, she reached in to grab the off-cut while the blade was still spinning.  I yelled pretty loud, and she pulled her hand away before any damage was done.  So now she has had two lectures from me on keeping her hands away from spinning blades even after the tool has been turned off, and she has had one good scare that came from ignoring that advice.  Hopefully her scare today will keep her on her toes.

Back to the project.

The spindles and panels are currently too long. That's intentional.  The last thing I will do on the headboard joinery is to trim these pieces to their correct length.  I have to get everything else complete and in place to know how long the spindles and panels need to be.  If I mess up that dimension, I have to make the spindles and panel all over again.  My blood pressure went up a few notches just thinking about that prospect.  Yikes.

I'm fairly pleased with the repair of the veneered panel (remember, I cut too much on one side and not enough on the other side).  The veneers now meet in the middle of the panel, and the repair is hidden in the dado of the spindle.

 Notice the happy face on the rail, which you can see in the photo below.  (The happy face is upside down here).  This is a trick I learned from William Ng.  William owns the William Ng School of Fine Woodworking in Anaheim, CA, and he is a wonderful craftsman.  He taught me to put a happy face on the "show" face of every part.  The happy face tells me which side goes in which direction, and also which side goes up.  So, right after I milled the top rail, I drew a happy face on it in permanent marker on the side that will be toward the mattress.  Now, I can immediately see which side of the rail goes to the mattress, and which direction is right-side up.  Since the happy face is down in this photo, I know that the rail is upside-down.  At this stage, it's pretty obvious which side is right-side up, but when I was milling it, it would have been easy to make a mistake.  It's difficult to see in this photo, but the grain in the top rail arches in the same direction that the final shape of the rail will arch, and that will be very obvious (and cool) once the finish is applied.  It would have sucked to get it upside-down.  So the happy face kept me from messing it up.

In addition to the happy face, every piece is labelled, and every mortise in the rail is numbered so that I put the right spindles in the right mortises.  So, in the picture below, the spindle to the right of the panel is "H5," which means that it is Headboard Spindle #5.  There is a corresponding #5 on the rail just below the mortise.  The spindle also has a happy face (not visible in this picture), so I know that this face of the spindle goes on show face, and that I know which end goes up.  Labelling is critical.  There are 34 pieces of mahogany in this bed, and many of them look very similar to one another.  I take a lot of time selecting the grain that each piece will have, as well as orienting the grain, and making each joint perfect.  So I have to keep careful track of which part is which, and how to orient each part.

At this point, I start getting pretty excited about how the final product will look.  It may not look like much now.  The boards are mostly square, and none of them are sanded.  There are ugly pencil lines and permanent marker labels and happy faces everywhere.  There are no ebony plugs, splines, roundovers, or other details.  And no finish.  But it's coming together very nicely.  It's going to be very cool.

Once were finished cutting the joinery for the top rail and spindles/panel, it was time to start shaping the top board of the bottom rail.  There are three bottom rails, and the top one needs to match the profile of the top rail.  Again, normally we cut profiles after we cut jointery, but that's not possible here because the spindles have to mate to the profiled edge of the bottom rail.  Here is the bottom rail cut to shape, and a picture of the top rail sitting on top of the bottom rail to compare their profiles.  We cut the profile using the same template method we used on the top rail and legs:  First, we screwed the template to the board, then we cut close to the line at the bandsaw, then we used a template bit at the router table to make it match the template perfectly.

The white patch on the left edge of the top rail in the above photo is masking tape.  I put that tape there when I was cutting the profile of the top rail on the router table.  The will be a curve detail at the joint between the top rail and the leg, and I need to leave extra meat on the rail and leg for that detail.  (More on that later.)  It's easy to forget those sorts of things when you are cutting profiles, so I put masking tape there to remind myself not to cut that area.

Once we had the bottom rail cut to shape, we transferred the lines from the top rail to the bottom rail, which the picture above shows.  The lines need to match the top rail exactly, because these lines define where the mortises go, and the mortises have to be matched exactly on the top and bottom rails or else the spindles will be crooked.  Crooked is bad.

We wrapped up the evening by setting up the multi-router to cut the mortises in the bottom rail.  This setup has to be very precise.  Normally, I prefer to cut the mortises first and then mill the tenon (in this case, the spindle) to match the mortise.  It's easy to shave just a little bit more off the tenon/spindle to fit perfectly into the mortise, and much more difficult to cut the mortise to perfectly fit a pre-made tenon/spindle.  But for a variety of reasons, that wasn't possible here.  So we have to cut the mortise perfectly to match the spindle.  We spent about 30 minutes setting up the multi-router and cutting a test-mortise on a piece of scrap, and it fit perfectly.  Then we stopped.  It's been a long day, and cutting tricky joinery at the end of a long day is a recipe for problems.  I'll check everything once more tomorrow, and we'll cut the joints then.

This is where it gets very exciting.  Once we cut the joinery for the spindles on the bottom rail, we just have a few fun details to cut and then we're ready for sanding and glue-up on the headboard!  And then another 50 hours on the footboard, and another 60-70 hours finishing, and we'll be done.  By the time we're finished, Jill and I will probably have a combined 350-400 hours in this bed.  Doing it myself would take about 250-275 hours.  This is Jill's first woodworking project, so things take her a bit longer.  But it's a lot more fun with her.

Joinery and veneers. DOH!

It's been a busy week in the shop!

My veneers finally arrived for the center panels.

This  veneer is crotch mahogany.  It is 1/32 of an inch thick.  (The picture above actually has two slices on top of each other.)  Because the grain of the wood is so varied, it wrinkles and crinkles when sliced this thin.

The veneer must be glued to a substrate.  The substrate is a panel of 3/4" MDF (medium density fiberboard).  First, I have to glue a layer of poplar veneer onto the panel sideways, and then the mahogany veneer will be glued vertically over the poplar.  Because the poplar grain will be glued perpendicular to the mahogany, it is called "crossbanding," and it will keep the panel stable.  Here's the poplar veneer, which is also 1/32" thick.

The slices of veneer first must be taped together so that they will completely cover the panel.  I use a special veneer tape (it's got a real fancy name -- "veneer tape"), which comes off easily when moistened.  Once the veneer is taped, I glue it to the panel using a veneer glue and a vacuum press to clamp the veneer down consistently.  

 Here is the panel with the poplar veneer glued on, and the veneer tape still in place but starting to peel off.  Notice the unsightly gap between the poplar panels at the end.  Whoops.  No big deal.  It'll cut off.  Also, it'll be completely covered by the mahogany veneer.

The next step is to flatten the mahogany.  I spray it with a veneer softener (basically water and glycerine), and then clamp it between two MDF boards overnight.  The spray shows how colorful the veneer will look when it is finished.

See how the last piece of veneer is floating in mid-air?  That's one of the magical properties of veneer.  It floats.  In mid-air.  It's because it's only 1/32 of an inch thick.  So it's lighter than the surrounding air, which makes it float like that.

Once I've flattened it, then I have to carefully trim a flat edge on each piece and then tape them together.  Here's one taped up pair:

The next step was to glue the veneer to the panel, then cut the panel to its final dimensions.  And this is the part that I messed up.  I've avoid making any major mistakes in the project up until this point, but here is where I made a huge mistake.  Can you see it?  Maybe just a little bit?

Yep, look at how wide the right piece of veneer is, and how narrow the left piece is.  I carefully measured exactly how much I needed to cut off of each side, and then I cut the left side twice.  DOH!

While I don't make many mistakes in woodworking, I invariably make one big mistake on almost every project.  Inevitably, it happens on the most expensive piece of material in the project.  (The veneer and supplies it took to make this panel cost about $300.)  And inevitably, it happens after I've already invested numerous hours getting the piece almost final.

When you make a huge mistake like this, you have three options.  One is to figure that the piece is much too expensive and took too much work to get this far, so go ahead and use it as is.  If you adopt that attitude, your woodworking will always turn out funky looking.  Another option is to start over.  I would normally do that, but this was a pretty expensive panel.  The third option is a design change.  After giving it a lot of thought, I've come up with a repair and a design change that will work just fine.  I glued one of the cut-off pieces back onto the left side, and while the repair isn't invisible, it is structurally sound.  I will now cut off an equal amount from the other side, and then hide the repair by stretching the two spindles that go on either side of the panel by 1/4" each.  That process is still underway, but I'll take some pictures later, and you'll see that it will be impossible to tell I ever made a mistake in the first place.

The rest of the headboard and footboard has gone much smoother.  I finished the joinery for the bottom rail on the footboard.  I ended up using a combination of my tablesaw, handsaws, chisels and handplanes to cut the tenons.  The goal is to get a joint tight enough that it the joint holds the pieces together without the need of glue.  Here is the bottom rail resting on the workbench, with the leg in place.  You can see that the joint is strong enough to hold the material together without glue, even though that's a pretty hefty chunk of mahogany hanging off the side of the rail in mid-air.  (And yes, unlike the veneer, this one really is hanging in mid-air, supported only by the joint to the rail.)

Here's a close-up of the joint.  We want a perfect fit, without gaps.  There's just a hair of a gap at the top, but the top will cut off, so that won't be visible:

With the footboard rail milled and the jointery complete, it's on to the headboard.  The headboard is very large -- considerably bigger than the footboard  --and I had to mill three large boards for the bottom rails.

Here's the three bottom rails milled and joined to one leg, with Jill on the side to give you a sense of proportion:

Now, the picture above makes you realize there are three kinds of men in the world:

1)  Men who look at the above picture and say, "Hey, that's a pretty cool looking headboard."

2)  Men who look at the above picture and say, "Hey, Jill's kinda cute."

3)  Men who look at the above picture and say, "Hey, how big is that TV hanging on the wall in your workshop?"

Which one did you notice first?

Once I wrapped up the mortise and tenon joints on the other side of the bottom rails, the next step was to cut the joinery for the top rail.  The top rail is very complex.  It connects to the legs with a miter joint, which I reinforce with loose tenons.  Then there is a graceful curve with cloudlifts on both the top and bottom of the rail.  Finally, there are numerous mortises to accept the spindles that span between the top and bottom rails, as well as the panel.  Those spindle joints are the most complex on the entire project.  The bottom edge of the top rail is an uneven shape, and yet there can be no gap between that edge and the top of each spindle.  I've seen other people develop complicated jigs for cutting the spindles to mate perfectly to the top rail, but I can't imagine doing that without a CNC router.  So I'm taking a very different approach.  I'm using my multi-router to cut sockets into the upper rail that will provide a perfect slot into which I can slide the entire top of the spindle.  This will result in a gapless joint.

Pictures are easier to follow than words, so here's a picture of the top rail in my multi-router.  You can see several mortises cut into the bottom of the rail.  The corners of the mortises are round for now, because the router bit is round.  But I will square those up with a chisel .

The multi-router is a life-saver.  Without it, I would have had to use a chisel and mallet to chop these mortises, because the rail is too large for my mortising machine.  It would have taken me at least an afternoon.  The multi-router took about an hour, and nearly all of that time was set-up.

Note that the top of the top rail is not cut out yet.  I had to leave it flat for now so that I could register the flat side against the stops on my multi-router, otherwise there would be no way to get the mortises perfectly straight up and down on all those curved surfaces.

In addition to all of this, Jill is wrapping up all of those ebony plugs and getting them ready to inlay once the headboard and footboard are glued up.  Here's what a boatload of ebony plugs looks like:

Next step:  Matching mortises on the bottom rail, milling the spindles, and then lots of sanding before gluing it all together.