Bed

My second project was building a bed. In a furniture store I saw the bed Primo DC of the Hülsta company, but I didn't like the colors and especially the price. Furthermore I wanted to make the bed wider as the original, so now the sleeping area is four square meters! The total costs including wood and the slatted frames were about €400.

Construction

When seeing the bed, one would guess that it lays on its skies. The next picture shows how it is actuelly is done: a metal frame has four legs and just stands on the ground.

The slatted frames lie on the metal frame, because of which the weight is distributed very well. The frames are retained some beams (54x100mm beams, consisting of three 18mm-planks glued together) Behind the bed a large curved wooden plate serves as backrest. Although the slatted frames have a size of 90x200cm, the mattresses are larger (100x200cm). This is OK, because the mattresses also lie on the beams surrounding the frames.

The biggest problem with building the bed were the curved wooden plates, which consist of multiple layers of wood. For this, you start by drawing the side view of the desired curve on two pieces of scap wood and use a jig saw to cut the form the way you want it. Now you can bend thin layers of wood, e.g. 4-6mm MDF. Start with two layers by applying wood glue to both layers. Now quickly (as long as the glue hasn't dried yet) put both layers together, bend them around the forms and screw the to the forms. I tried to illustrate this with the following drawing.

When the glue hast dried, the screws can be removed and you get a thin plate with the desired form, even when it still is too thin. Now glue an MDF-layer on both sides, although you can't use normal clamps to press the layers together. With a little imagination a solution for thing van be found. Now the top and bottom side have to be cut with a circular say, because all layers have different form after bending them.

The large part of the skis can also be made with the method discribed above. Unfortunately, this doesn't work when bending in a very small radius. For this a great invention has been made: bendable multiplex. In normal multiplex, the fibre direction of every layer of wood is rotated 90°, which makes multiplex very stiff. When the middle of three layers is very thin, the multiplex can be strongle bent in one direction without breaking it. When using this multiplex with the method described above, you can make very small radii.

The part with the very small radius and the straighter part are now glued together and reinforced with a metal plate screwed to the bottom side. The picture above also shows how the skis are screwed to the frame of the bed and how the frame is connected to the back plane. When you look closely, you can see that the back plane rest on the floor in the middle of the bed. Unfortunately I didn't manage to apply the torque from the back side by those few screws. Because of this, the back side is sustained bei a metal structure, which can be seen below.