queen size bed plans

7/28/2019 Queen Size Bed Plans

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Queen size bed plans

Plans for a bed with queen size size mattress (60"x80", 152x203 cm)

This page is optimized for viewing on the computer. For printing all thedrawings to take to the workshop, use thePrinter optimized format.Depending on how many drawings you want per page, play with the paperorientation and scale settings under page setup in your browser.

These plans are in Metric units. You can generate imperial dimensions byloading the SketchUp model into SketchUp, and setting the units to imperialunder "Model Info". However, the sizes are all rounded to be even millimeters,so the units will not work out to nice even values in fractional inches.

Bed postsThe bed posts are made by gluing two 2x4's flat against each other, and then

cutting out a 6x6 cm section.
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The knobs at the top of the posts are turned by putting the entire post into the

lathe. If you don't have a lathe with a very long bed, you may wish to make the

knobs separately, and glue them onto the posts. This looks almost as good.

The illustration of the bed below is rendered with tapered posts instead ofturned posts. You can explore what the bed looks like with tapered posts

instead of turned posts by turning on the "sawed posts" layer and hiding the

"turned posts" layer.


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Headboard

The headboard is doweled together with 5/8" dowels. Do not cut the profiles

into the edges of the pieces until you have dry fit. Once dry fit, cut the slots

and the chamfers on the inside edges with a router, and carve the chamfers

all the way into the corner with a knife or chisel.


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To get the shape of the panel, just trace out the outline from the dry fit

assembly onto a piece of plywood, and offset the outline by the depth of the

slot cut on the inside edges of the panels.


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Footboard

The footboard is made of two pieces of wood glued side to side. It is too wide

to be able to make out of one piece of lumber


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Bed rails and slats

The bed rails have a hardwood ledge screwed and glued to the bottom edge,

which is used to hold up the slats.

The slats are tapered towards the end to allow them to sit lower in the bed,giving more room for the mattress.


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Bed rail clips

This view shows how the bed rail clips fit into everything. The bed rail clips

allow for easy disassembly if the bed needs to be moved.

Alternatively, you can fasten the rails with large pocket holes, like I did whenIbuilt this bed. to avoid having to buy bed rail clips.
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Fasteners

Putting the bed together

Here you can see how therails finally meet the post.

With the dowels slightly

tapered, and the holes

flared out, these insert

relatively easily, and should

still be manageable even if

there is expansion or

contraction in the wood

from humidity changes.

I used three 3.5" #10 woodscrews to screw the rail tothe post. This is probably abit overkill. I'm happy withthe results though. Its


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probably at least as strong as using bed rail clips, as I did forthis bed, andless costly too.

It does unfortunately meanthat a screwdriver isnecessary to disassemblethe bed for moving. Thoughthe bed rail clips are notwithout their drawbackseither. Every time I havehad to take the other bedapart, I ended up having touse a rubber mallet to popopen the hooks.
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Finally, it was time to makethe slats. I cut most ofthese out of 10' 2x6's,because four of these couldbe cut out of one 10' 2x6

without any scrap.

I tapered the ends of theslats, so that they would sita little lower in the bed.With 13 slats to trim onboth sides, I now have 26of these funny shapedwedges lying behind mybandsaw.

And finally,putting it alltogether. I'mrather pleasedwith the result.

And all for lessthan $100 inmaterials.

All theequipment inthe back of myshop isonmobilebases, so I

could roll it outof the way forassemblingthis bed. My

presentbasement workshopis much better than myold workshopthat way.
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I didn't leave it together forlong though. The next stepwas to varnish it. I made avery short temporary bedrail to hold the head and

footboard upright againsteach other whilevarnishing. The bed railsthemselves I varnishedseparately on workbench.That way, I didn't run therisk of inadvertently gluingthe pieces together with

varnish.

Also note the printing on the back of the headboard. The plywood came froma shipping crate that Nortel had shipped to Research in Motion back around2002. It was made with some very nice plywood. It's the same plywood I usedfor this otherbed of similar design,

Making the bed rails

I made the bed rails from

2x10's. Unfortunately,

some of the 2x10's I boughtwere noticeably cupped. All

the 2x10's in the stack at

the lumber store had flaws

in them, and these were the best I could find.

In an ideal world, I would just have used my 12" jointer to flatten the board, butin the real world, I only have a6" jointer, so that wasn't an option.
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So instead I used a small3" power planer to planedown the edges a little bitso that the resulting boardwas approximately flat,

though not a smoothcontiguous surface.

I then passed the boardsthrough the jointer, with the

just-flattened side down toflatten up the other side.

After that, I flipped theboards, and planed anothermillimeter off the side I hadflattened with the hand-heldpower planer, at which

point I had a continuous smooth and flat surface on both sides.

The bed rails need to have a ledge on the bottom edge to hold the slats. Thisledge fits into a rabbet cut into the bottom side ofthe rails. I cut this rabbet in two steps. I don'toften use afeatherboard, but for this large piece,really helped, because I couldn't always push thelarge board against the push stick as Imaneuvered it over the saw.

I glued someblocks of
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hardwood between the rail and the ledge. These ensure that the slats of thebed will not slide side to side. They also serve to help hold the ledge in placebecause they are firmly glued to both the ledge and the rail itself.

As further reinforcement, I screwed the ledge in place with some 2" drywall

screws screwed through the ledge from the bottom, and into the bed rail.

For each the ledge, I apiece of hardwood 4 x 1.8cm and 2 meters long for. I

didn't have any pieces ofhardwood that length lyingaround and wanted tomake use of some uglyscraps of maple instead.So I finger joined somepieces end to end using

mybox joint jig. I spaced the fingers such that the width of a thin kerf bladewas just right for a tight joints.

These joints set rigid surprisingly fast on account of the large glue area.

I then glued the strip ofhardwood to the bottomedge of the rails, makingsure it made good contacteverywhere. That ledgehas to hold the weight ofwhatever is in the bed.
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One of the finger joints, asit looks on the bottom ofone of the rails. For goodmeasure, I also put a screwin every 50 cm or so, but

didn't photograph thatstep.

I drilled two holes into the ends of the rails, where I then glued short pieces ofdowel into the ends of them. These pieces of dowel protrude about 2 cm, andmate with the holes drilled into the posts. I tapered the dowels a little on thebelt sander, to make them easier to insert into the holes on the posts. These

dowels are meant to transfer the vertical load from the bed rails onto theposts.

Pocket holes to join the rails


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Next I glued some plugs into the rails

near the ends. These plugs are

positioned to be at the end of some

pocket holes yet to be cut. They are

there to help reinforce the wood

where the screw goes. After gluing in

these plugs, I drilled another set of

holes just behind the plugs to be the

pocket part of the pocket holes.

To help me align the drill for

drilling the screw hole part of thepocket holes, I made a temporary

drill-aiming guide, which I just

held against my drill by hand. Thetop edge of this drill is flat and

parallel with the axis of the drill

itself, so that provided a good

reference surface.

With the aiming guide held to the

top of the drill, I can make surethat the drill is aimed correctly so

that it will drill into the middle of

the pocket. My aiming guide was

really only good for getting the

vertical alignment right, but forhorizontal component was easy

enough to eyeball from above.


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After I drilled the pocket holes, Ichiseled open the pockets a bit

more, and then used the tip of a

3/8" drill to form a slightcountersink at the bottom of the

pockets.

After that, I routed the top edges

of the bed rails to the same profile

that I used for the headboard and

footboard.

The wood wasn'tperfect, and there

was one spotwhere I inserted a plug before routing the edges. That defect is on the inside,

facing the mattress, so only the top edge of the board is visible when it'sassembled. The plug hides the defect rather nicely.

Joining bed posts to the headboard

Next it was

time to join the

headboard to

the legs. Idrilled five

dowel holes

into the ends

of the

headboard

with a hand

drill. The

headboard is

way too wide

for me to get it

into a drill press. I suppose I could have usedthis trickto drill the holes into

the ends, but I would have had to rig up some extra high support for my drill

press to even do that. So instead, I just clamped it to a work bench, with
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spacers under it to bring it to the right height so that one of my hand drills,

upside down on the bench drilled just horizontal into the piece.

This helps guide the drill, but some of the holes were not quite as straight as Ihad hoped, but still better than I did on the last bed that I had built. So maybe Ishould have rigged up the drill press, or maybe usedthis jig.

Next I transferred the holepositions to the posts,using much the sameapproach I had used on the

headboard. Again, I offsetthe post by half the width ofa hole, so I could justtransfer the hole's edgeposition for my centers inthe post's holes.

I could put the posts on mydrill press, so these holeswere easy to get straight.

To compensate for a few ofthe holes being slightlycrooked, I tapered one sideof the dowels that I put intothose holes on the beltsander.
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I then stuckthe head andfootboards

together, justto see how itwould look. Ididn't glue theposts onto thehead andfootboards yetthoughbecause I stillneeded to routthe final profile

onto the top edges of the headboard and footboard.

Also note how the footboard is styled similar to the headboard, but shorter,and without panels. All the steps for the footboard are the same as theheadboard, except that it's simpler and lacks panels.

The next step was to route a nice round onto the top of the headboard. I useda 1/2" round router bit, though I didn't use the whole of the quarter roundcurvature because I wanted to still have just a bit of an edge on the board.


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This view better shows thecurve that I routed onto theboard.

I left routing the curve until

quite late in the process sothat if I ended up bangingor nicking the top edge ofthe headboard orfootboard, it would be in thepart of the wood to berouted away.

Before gluing the posts to the head and footboard, it was time to drill the holesfor mounting the bed rails onto the posts. These consisted of slanted pilotholes for my giant pocket hole screws, and two 3/4" alignment peg holes. Toget the angle for the slanted holes, I put the post on a wedge on the drillpress. Tilting the drill press table would not have worked because the way ittilts, the drill press's column would have interfered with where I needed to putthe post.


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I flared out the openings ofthe holes for the alignmentpins to the bed rails. Theseholes accept the pegs atthe ends of the bed rails

(more on that later).

Finally, I was ready to mate the posts onto the headboard. Note how the

second and fourth dowel from the left appear to be just a bit crooked. That'sbecause they were, and I tapered the one side of them so that they'd fit in thestraight hole on the post. I made sure the post fit perfectly to the headboardbefore I put any glue on anything.


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For clamping on the posts,I didn't have any clampslong enough to span thewidth of the headboard. Soinstead, I firmly clamped a

piece of wood to the middleof the headboard, and put aclamp on it stretching to thefar end. I then used thatpiece of wood to clampagainst with my 3 foot barclamps.

queen size bed plans

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