Thu
Jul
16
2009
4 Monkeys... 4 Beds
Lisa had been wanting some captain beds for the kids. She showed me a bed from pottery barn, and said, can you make this? I said, “mmm….I can try.”
The trying began when Albertson’s remodeled and threw away a couple hundred board feet of beautiful painted poplar. The ends were filled with screws and the paint would have to be sanded away, but that was the perfect foundation for the project. I’m all about free wood.
A couple months into the project, I was reaping the consequences of being cheap. I never realized how difficult it would be to make four of anything. For example the bed has 3 drawers times made up of 5 pieces of wood each of which had to be squared on all 4 sides times 4 beds. That equals 240 cuts. Just to get the wood the right size. Repeat that math for every single piece of the bed.
Because I was cutting so much wood, I wanted to make sure I didn’t make any mistakes so I drew it up in my favorite CAD program Rhino3d.
If you want to download the file here you go
Making the legs was a lot of work and fun. I used my CNC machine to drill precision holes for the referencing pins. I used a bunch of the scrap poplar to make trim for the posts.
Gluing up was time consuming at best, but it was fun to start seeing it come together.
My paint booth ended up being our back yard deck. Its not exactly a looker so we didn’t mind using it for a paint booth. Kinda fun actually.
Lisa helped put the edge banding on the top of the drawers
Then finally came the day when we got to assemble them! Success!
