Ready to Turn
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