Four Post Bed Build - Curly Cherry

[Matt Hutchinson]

My sister wants me to make her a king size 4 post bed from curly cherry on short notice. So over the next couple weeks I will be slamming this thing together. I had trouble locating any 6/4 and 12/4" curly cherry here in MI, so I ordered some from PA. The 12/4 is not very curly, but it does have a sort of "super sized" bees wing pattern to it.....still very pretty.

- Hutch

[Chuck Thoits]

[Gary Zimmel]

Looking forward to seeing this one progress..

[Tom Niemi]

Looking forward to this build Hutch, great looking wood in my opinion

[glenn bradley]

Oooo, Ahhh, Ohhh. This'll be fun.

[Bob Gibson]

Pretty wood

Looking forward to seeing how you build yours

[Rob Keeble]

Oooo, Ahhh, Ohhh. This'll be fun.

Ok this is uncanny but Glenn it was exactly what i was thinking of saying before i got to your post. I guess one of those "great minds think alike moments but they also say " fools never differ"

Sent from my MB860 using Tapatalk 2

[Matt Hutchinson]

Thanks for the encouragement all!

Due to the cost of curly cherry my sister decided that we should laminate the bed rails to save a little on materials. The furniture maker in me would normally oppose this, but I let it go this time. Here you can see a piece of curly cherry sandwiched between two regular cherry boards. I glued it up into a large block. I will then resaw down the middle, leaving two bookmatched, curly cherry-faced rails. The same will be done for the foot rail.



The surfaces on the bed posts weren't perfect, and they needed to be hand planed to smooth out the tear-out caused by the Makita planer. Not wanting to have to smooth the entire length, I went to the jointer and made relief cuts where I knew the wood was going to be turned down narrower. I also made the relief because I didn't know how much material I might have to hand plane away if thing didn't go as planned. In the end, all I had to do was make a few passes over a 30" length.



My smoothing plane is set up with a blade sharpened with a 5* back bevel to give it a pseudo-york pitch to help get through the curly grain without chip-out. I also cambered the edge 5 to 8 thousandths at the just the corners to make it easier to plane without leaving track marks. With the plane taking about a 2 thousandth shaving, the surfaces came out perfect. No tear-out, no track marks. Of course, I will have to run the plane over the parts again just before applying finish.



After having set for a few days, a couple of the posts warped about 3/16" of an inch. But now that the areas that will accept the bed rails have been smoothed all I have to do is mount the posts on the lathe a little off center (to account for the warp), and all four edges of the square sections will be parallel with the axis of rotation.



As you can see, the 79" bed rails barely fit on the lathe. Once I get some rough shaping in, I will place a steady rest on the workpiece to reduce the flexing that will occur.

-Hutch

[Jeff Bower]

Thanks for sharing Hutch!

[Darren Wright]

That's a lot of clamps and some great looking wood, thanks for taking us along!