Andrew Pitts - Furniture Maker, Works in Progress, Custom Handcrafted Hardwood Carved Pencil Post Bed

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Dolphin Bed rendering

Years ago I designed and built a Pencil Post Bed for my wife (OK, for me, as well). I always hoped that eventually I would get to make another of these beds, and I was very happy when friends asked if I could design and build a bed for a new addition to their house and that they were partial to four poster beds. They liked my design, a very substantial one in that the rails that hold up the box spring are made of very heavy lumber, in this case 1-1/2" x 10" red oak. This queen size bed was to stand in a bedroom with large windows facing the Potomac River at the Chesapeake Bay, so some sort of nautical theme seemed in order. My clients particularly liked the idea of jumping dolphins in the design, and I could see a split headboard representing the sea and the sky, so we came up with a design that would use two different woods for the headboard, and that carved jumping dolphins and a seagull would be applied to the headboard. Additionally, they wanted the mattress height to be about 34 inches off the floor, so the headboard would be particularly high on the posts so it clears the mattress and the carvings are not obscured by the pillows.

My first task after designing the piece was to assemble the lumber. This piece would require large planks, and fortunately I had previously milled cherry into 12/4 (3") lumber that would be perfect for the posts. For the rails, the design called for very thick, 1-1/2" red oak and I had exactly four pieces

of 8/4 (2") lumber in my stock! (I'll have to mill some more, soon) My first operation was to cut the cherry plank into four blanks, and since the plank was a bit warped and very thick, I knew I would have to use the bandsaw to make the cuts. At right you can see the plank supported by the bandsaw table and a portable roller, ready to be cut.

The bandsaw cuts were made freehand, after penciling lines to follow, so after cutting the blanks I

used the jointer to square them, then the planer to thickness the sides that had not been jointed. Similarly, I flattened the rail planks on my large 16" jointer - these planks were about 11" wide - as seen in the photo at left. With the planks flattened on one side, I used my 20" thickness planer to machine them to a bit over 1-1/2", as seen at right. With all the pieces cut and roughly milled, I let them sit for a week or so and acclimate to their new dimensions. Later I could clean up any movement in the planks, if necessary.

Fast forward a week and I am now ready to machine the posts and rails. A pencil post bed uses large mortise and tenon joints between the rails and posts, and typically bed bolts are used to hold the pieces together. Bed bolts are simply long bolts that go through the posts and into the ends of the

tenons on the rails, engaging a nut in the rail. To cut the large mortises in the posts I used my 1950's era ShopSmith 10ER, an all-in-one machine that was popular with hobbyists. This machine is very useful in the drill press mode as it has a very large table and a strong headstock. I have a sliding jig I made some years ago on which I can clamp stock and move it back and forth under a spinning mill bit in the drill press chuck. Lowering the bit into the work while sliding the stock back in forth cuts a very clean mortise. For the posts I used my largest end mill bit, a 1/2" bit and cut the 7/8" x 8" x 1" deep mortises in multiple setups. The photo at right shows this operation. My right hand is lowering the bit and my left hand is moving the jig and the post stock left and right.

Following the machining of the mortises, they still had rounded corners, so using a corner chisel I squared off all the mortise corners so the rails would have firm, square seats upon which to rest. Then it was time to cut the tenons in the rails. Since the rails were heavy 1-1/2" x 10" red oak planks, I had to come up with a way to accurately cut the tenons with the planks well supported. I could not use my tenon cutting jig on the table saw (take a look at this link to see what the tenon cutting jig is ... but remember to come back here) because the planks were so

large, so I cut the tenons using a router with a straight cutting bit, first cutting shoulders accurately using a large crosscut sled on a table saw. I marked exactly where the tenons should be, then I mounted my very large crosscut sled on my table saw and cut the shoulders as seen at right. I cut the shoulders on both sides of the planks and on

the edges. That way I did not have to worry about the next operation being exactly precise. That operation was to hog out the waste with the router, as seen at left. I set the router to the correct depth, then using a board as a guide for the router base I cut away the waste, creating a nice flat tenon. Of course, I had to do the cut on both sides of the plank, and on both ends, and I had to use a hand saw and chisel to cut away the one-inch of material on the top and bottom of each tenon, since the tenons were only 8-inches long. I test fit the tenons in the mortises, and used a shoulder plane to fine tune the fit. I wanted a snug fit, but not tight nor sloppy.

Next I bored the holes for the bed bolts. I photographed a bed bolt and its cover, shown at right, so you can get a picture of what I'm about to say. The bed bolt is simply a 3/8" bolt with a special nut on the end. Older bed bolts used a square nut and a special square head, but this design uses a cylindrical shaped

nut that fits into a hole bored into the side rail, very easy to fit, and a standard hex bolt. And this type of bed bolt was less expensive than the square nut/square head type. I love win-win situations! The cover for the bolt head is simply a round piece of cast brass with a little tab. A hole is drilled in the tab for a mounting screw. The tab is screwed to the post (leg) so the round part covers the bolt head and simply swings away when a socket wrench has to be put on the bolt head. The first thing I did was to bore a countersunk hole for the bolt head, using a Forstner bit large enough for the socket wrench to fit into. At left you can see the drill press set up to bore this hole. The Forstner bit makes a very

clean hole with a pilot point in the center for guiding the next drill bit in the sequence, which was to drill a 7/16" hole completely through the post for the bed bolt. Of course, the placement of these holes had to be dead center on the mortise so the hole I would drill in the end of the rail would be centered. To drill the rail hole, I used the ShopSmith in the horizontal boring mode, as seen at right. In this configuration, I can lay heavy planks on their flat faces and come in with the bit horizontally. After boring all the holes in the ends of the rails, I bored holes at 90

degrees for the bed bolt nut. When all the holes were bored, I did a test fit of all the rails and posts, as seen at left. It's nice when all the piece fit together correctly! You might notice some other pieces of lumber in the photo at left. The insides of the rails have shoulders made from poplar upon which the box spring will rest. The particular box spring for this bed is a two piece affair, made from two 30" wide box springs, so I had to create a center support for the center edges of the two halves. To do this, I made two cross pieces that fit into notches cut in the side supports. Blow up the photo to see what I mean. Also, I screwed the supports to the rails so that later they could be lowered in the frame if, in the future, one of those plush extra thick mattresses was purchased. That would maintain the mattress top at 34 inches, as designed. Always trying to think ahead!

With the bed frame joinery done, I next concentrated on shaping the posts and getting them ready to accept the headboard. As you can see from the rendering of the design, the posts were to be tapered, both above and below the rails. What I could not show easily in the rendering was the slight curvature of the taper above the rails. The slight curve makes the post more interesting, I think. I made a template of the curve using some hardboard and then traced the template onto each of the posts on two sides. Since it is really hard to cut a template to a curve symmetrically on both sides (trust me, I tried to do it), what I ended up doing was to get a curve I liked on one side of the template and then flipped the template to mirror the curve for both sides of the post, and I did this on two adjacent faces so I ended up with four lines to cut. In the photo at right I am

using the bandsaw to cut the curves. Now, you might realize that in cutting these curves I am going to cut off the side with the lines I just drew on the adjacent face of the post. That is where the blue masking tape comes in. Once a face was cut

off, I taped it back in place temporarily so that the blank was once again square. That way, I still had the lines to cut on the adjacent face, as well as providing a flat face to ride on the bandsaw table after rotating the blank to cut the adjacent faces. Does that make sense? Of course, bandsaws leave fairly course saw marks that must be planed away, so using both my smooth plane and my small block plane I planed off all the saw marks. It was possible to use the plane on the curve because the curve radius was so large, that is, the curve was very shallow. At left I am using the block plane to smooth a face on a post. Once the faces were smooth, I used a spokeshave to soften the corners, as seen at right. I held off on the lower tapered part, the bottom of the post, until later. First, I needed good reference surfaces to do a little more joinery in the head posts.

The foot posts could be cut on all sides as I described, but the head posts still needed a way to attach the headboard. If you noticed in the rendering, the headboard was actually designed as two planks, separated by a small space. The bottom plank would represent the sea and the top plank the sky. Since these planks were to be fairly wide, I would have to build in a way for them to expand and shrink in width as the seasons changed (wood expands and contracts in width with humidity changes, so around my parts in the winter lumber inside a home shrinks and in summer it swells), so I settled on a mortise and tenon arrangement. Each plank would have three tenons per end, fit snugly in mortises cut in the ends of the planks. However, when cutting the mortises in the posts the tenons closest to the boundary between top and bottom headboard planks would fit snugly in their mortises, but the other tenons, the ones farther from this interface would have post mortises that were cut extra wide. That way, when the headboard planks changed width,

the tenons would be able to slide a bit up and down in the post mortises but at the interface between sea and sky the planks would be fixed. In order to cut the mortises, I used my Domino machine. This is a tool that cuts a slot (mortise) that exactly fits a premade loose tenon. The idea is to cut a mortise in both pieces to be joined and glue the "Domino" in place. The neat thing about the machine is that I

can set it to cut the mortises extra wide so that a tenon can slide a bit. If that tenon is not glued into the enlarged mortise, it will be able to move forever more! And the machine cuts the mortises quickly. The photo at right shows me using the Domino machine. After cutting all the mortises in both the headboards and the posts, I set to tapering the bottoms of each post. To do this I used my taper jig, which is a home make jig I can adjust to cut tapered legs on the table saw. It adjusts to most any taper, and holds the material securely while cutting, a boon to safety. At left you can see me tapering one side of the base of a post. After cutting the tapers, I used the spokeshave to soften the corners. To give the illusion of a curved taper I relieved

the center of the corner more than the ends. The photo at right shows a rough fit-up of the posts and headboards. Note the "sky" is tulip poplar with heartwood more or less streaked along the board. That heartwood was kind of greenish when cut, but in a few years it will be nice and chocolate brown and will resemble a distant bank of stratus and cirrus clouds (I was a meteorology major in college). The "sea" is a plank of ambrosia maple. This is maple where a colony of bugs got into the wood and left a chemical that stained the wood in telltale oblong streaks. The bugs are all gone, now, but in this particular piece of wood the many streaks look like a school of minnows diving deeper into the water. Of course, they are diving because they know soon there will be a seagull flying overhead looking for lunch!

Now I was close to making the finishing touches on the bed, without the applied carvings. All the parts would be finished with shellac polish, which is simply blonde shellac flakes dissolved in denatured alcohol to make very thin 1/2 lb cut shellac. What this means is that the solution thickness was equivalent to dissolving 1/2 lb of flakes in a gallon of alcohol. Of course, I don't mix up a gallon, since prepared shellac has a shelf life, so I make up a pint at a time. One ounce of shellac flakes to a pint of alcohol makes my shellac polish. I use dewaxed flakes, but the particular package of shellac I used still had solids that would not dissolve, so I strained the solution before using it. To apply the shellac, first I sanded the wood to 400 grit, then I wiped on a coat of shellac with a cloth. When it dried, about 20 minutes, I resanded and then increased the smoothness to 600 grit. I applied six or so coats -- I know when I have applied enough because the surface feels silky and any more sanding degrades the finish. When I use shellac, I always

finish the parts before assembly so that I don't have to worry about sanding into any corners. After the shellac has dried to be very solid, I use some Briwax to wax the surfaces, and that's it. Now, after finishing the headboard I still wanted to give the top panel a more

finished and substantial look. I milled a strip of cherry, about 1/4" thick and 1-1/8" wide. I rounded the edges of the strip using a roundover bit in my router table, finished it with shellac, and glued it to the top of the headboard, shown at right. It pays to have lots of clamps! With everything finished, I glued the domino tenons into the ends of the headboard panels, placed loose dominos in mortises I had cut in the top and bottom panels at the middle of the interface to keep them registered (in the same plane) to one another, and then assembled the bed using the bed bolts. The final step was to attach the covers on the bedbolt holes. These are simply cast brass plates that screw onto the posts. They swing away when it is necessary to get a socket wrench on the bolt head. The photo at left shows the finished bed. Were it not for the carvings I would do next, this bed could be used. It is a basic four poster bed. If you are curious, the construction (less design time) to this point took me 66.3 hours (I keep my actual production time in a log, accurate to 1/10th of an hour).

Last summer I took a one-week relief carving course from a famous English carver, Chris Pye. During the course, we carved two fish. Why fish? Because fish encompass all the relief carving techniques for beginning carvers. I remember Chris telling us that we should go home and carve another fish, so we would gain proficiency. Of course, I went home and worked on another commissioned piece and did not go fishing. Well, there is some kind of justice at play, because on this bed my clients wanted dolphins carved. OK, dolphins are not fish. In fact, what I actually carved were porpoises, but let's not get picky. They swim in the water, so for all practical porpoises I was again carving fish! Full disclosure: I spent an

evening reviewing my notes and Mr. Pye's relief carving book. Next day I started work. First, I selected a walnut plank, since I had decided that walnut would provide the contrast I needed with the background. I had already used an outline of a dolphin for my rendering of the bed, so I printed the outline full size and made a pattern. I transferred the pattern to the walnut and was ready to go. First, I would remove the wood

surrounding the outline, called lowering the ground. I needed to keep a quarter inch or so of material intact so I could clamp the work to the bench during the carving. Using a router with a straight bit, as shown at right, I quickly removed 3/4" of material. In our class last summer, we lowered using gouges, which are carvers names for curved chisels, but I assure you the router was much faster, and I'm not a purist. At left you can see the dolphin after lowering. Of course, I was carving two dolphins, so for efficiency I did all these operations on both pieces.

Now it was carving time. I spent some time preparing the gouges I would be using, sharpening and honing as necessary, then commenced roughing in the outline better. I had purposely kept the router bit clear of the outline, since I was free handing the router and did not want to slip and rout right into the poor little fishy. So, using a mallet and gouge I roughed in right up to the outline. With both pieces roughed in, I combined a few processes to complete each dolphin one at a time. I cut the

fins to the correct

level, rounded the body, made the dolphin specific curves around the face (I had never really thought how complex the dolphin anatomy is around the head and snout), and carved in the eyes and mouth. At left I am using a gouge to round the body. You cannot tell from the photos, but the carving was undercut to give a sense of depth, a process known as High Relief carving. When I was satisfied that these actually looked like dolphins

(porpoises), and you be the judge, I used my bandsaw to cut away the background. When I lowered the ground, the stress in the wood caused it to warp (this is to be expected), so the bandsaw cut was not as effective as theory would imply. I had to cut wide so that I would not cut into the body, which you can infer from the photo at left. So, the fish ended up being a bit fatter than planned, but that turned out to not be a problem. I flattened the back on a large length of sanding belt and trimmed a bit with a gouge, and then applied the first coat of oil/varnish mix to the carvings. Tomorrow I will carve a sea gull.

And then I attached the dolphins to the top piece of the headboard with two stainless steel screws apiece, attached the seagull with a single screw, all to allow lots of seasonal wood movement, and here is the finished bed!

Individually Styled and Crafted

Fine Hardwood Furniture

by

Andrew Pitts ~ FurnitureMaker