bed furniture plans - Pencil Post Bed Cherry Part 1

bed furniture plans

A few years ago I decided to undertake a project that I thought would be no problem; a King sized pencil post bed. After all, it only had 9 pieces, how hard could it be? Well, the challenge with this bed was the fact that I had not dealt with single pieces of wood this large as a finished size. First, it is important to note that all the pieces are made from a single piece of solid cherry, not pieces glued together to make thicker pieces. The posts were made from 12/4 cherry, to a finished size of 2.5"x2.5" and the rails from 6/4 cherry, to a finished size of 1.5"x6". Selecting the stock was tricky because I needed to find pieces wide enough, long enough, and relatively straight enough; I needed as straight of grain stock as I could find.

So, after picking through stock at my local lumber store, Peach State Lumber, I came home with this stash.

From PencilPostBed

The pieces were pretty straight, no curves or bows in them, but they did have a cup in them. With all pieces having a finished length of over 70+", they were too big for my power tools so it was off to hand tools. I started by hand planing one side as flat as possible, then I could feed it through my power planer. This is the setup for hand planing them flat.

From PencilPostBed

You can see in this picture below how I use chalk to keep up with my progress, while also checking with a square. Anywhere chalk shows up, I know there is still more to be taken away.

From PencilPostBed

Finally! After a couple days of planing, and thinking my arms were going to fall off, I have a flat side.

From PencilPostBed

Now that I had one flat side, I could use my power planer to do the other side and go to final thickness. I had to use some out feed supports due to the length.

From PencilPostBed

Once I had all the pieces milled to thickness, it was back to the hand plane to flatten and smooth one edge.

From PencilPostBed

Once that edge was smooth, I could rip the pieces on the table saw to near finished width, leaving myself a little room for cleanup with a hand plane again.

That takes care of the milling of all the wood. In the next part, I will talk about the process of creating the pencil tapers, and how nerve racking that was, as well as creating the lambs tongue detail.

Do you find information about bed furniture plans are you looking for? If not, below may help you find more information about the bed furniture plans. Thank you for visiting, have a nice day.

Related Posts by Categories