Foolish Bunk Bed: Week 3

Made some exciting progress on this bunk bed this week! First I chopped out the mortises for the long stretchers of the bed. I have been using a drill to do a lot of the work here to avoid hurting my elbows like I did six months ago, but I still have to use chisels to square everything up.

Next I cleaned up the long stretchers:

Then I laid out the tenons and sawed the waste off. Ripping 10” through 4” thick fir was hard work!

After I finished getting all the tenons formed, I did a dry fit before gluing up the trestles:

It all fits, though getting a tight fit without the tusk keys or a couple strong helpers is basically impossible. Unfortunately I had one of the posts rotated and it caused the wood to break at the bottom of the post (if you zoom in you can see the split in the pictures above. I glued that together but regret making such a basic mistake.

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Next I’ll make wedges, glue together the trestles, and make the slots for the tusk keys. This coming weekend includes a Destination Imagination competition so the progress will not be significant. My guess is this project completes late April.