Walnut Raised Panel Bed

So I built a bed. Our old bed was... uh... not great. Good news though, this one is an improvement (let's hear it for setting a low bar!).

But in all seriousness, I worked off a random advertisement that caught my wife's eye. Naturally, I looked at it aghast at how much they wanted for the quality they were providing. Not to let some furniture outlet show me up, I built this out of solid walnut because there's two ways of doing something, right, or again.

The general construction of the bed is four raised panel doors side by side on the head and foot boards. This was fun in that I got to make an absurd amount of sawdust using a set of Freud raised panel router bits (except my panel bit is a cove, not a bevel, but you get the idea) and a shiny new router table from Rockler. Actually making the raised panels isn't so much difficult as it is tedious. Luckily, it's the kind of thing that's easy to find youtube tutorials on (this is a great one).

So, essentially I made up eight walnut panels, four long and four short for the head and foot board respectively. Cut a *lot* of rails and stiles, and got down to it. The biggest issue was the final glue up, I didn't have any clamps long enough to span the width of a queen sized bed (never enough clamps *shakes fist at cloud*), so off to the store I went to pick up a couple bad boys with 72" of pure clamping goodness.

To give everything some nice depth, I built a cap of walnut with some beveled corners to crown the head and foot boards.

The bed rails are attached and detachable thanks to this a set of bed hardware from Rockler. Speaking of good youtube tutorials, Sean Rubino has a good one on this set of hardware, although in all candor, I did mine a little differently, but it was a great help... I swear). In any case, it allowed me to have fun with a palm router and a mortising chisel, which... who couldn't have fun with those?

I screwed poplar to the back of the headboard and right at the base of the foot board to stiffen and add structural stability to what was really a pretty unstable design of four raised panels all hinging on just the tongue and groove construction that holds them together.

Similarly, you can see the poplar that I screwed into the rail to create a ledge for the poplar slats to rest. Eleven slats provide a stable platform for the box spring and mattress.

For varnish I used Pratt & Lambert 38 Gloss, which darkens up the walnut to a nice, rich, chocolate brown.

Anyway, I took a bunch more pictures, so I'll be darned if I don't just tack 'em on the end of this post: