Sawdust on the Floor

I often wonder if it’s just me, or does everyone have the same kind of luck that I do.  Where nothing is simple, where no project no matter how large or small never seems to have an end point.  If you have been following the escapades of our headboard, then you know that the headboard project started out with us buying a new bed and the salesman failing to tell us that new bed required special hardware to mount a headboard.  And that lead us to discover that our old headboard really didn’t look right with the bed. And lead to me deciding to build a new headboard.  Well, the saga continues.

With the help of a couple of neighbors  I was able to get the headboard into the house and into the bedroom.  Thankfully, our bedroom is on the first floor. I am not sure I could have gotten that thing upstairs.  Any how the headboard looks great, and the lamps mounted in the corner posts, are really perfect.  So that should have ended the project, right?  When we moved the bedroom nightstands back into place after getting the headboard bolted in place, we discovered a new issue. 

Common logic says that the nightstands go on the outside of the corners of the headboard.  But because I had made the Mongo corner posts, this placed the closest edge of the night stands over 10″ from the edge of the bed.  That distance was too far away to made using the night stands practical. Plus they really looked silly begin that far away from the bed. 

So we then tried the night stands in front of the headboard corner posts.   This looked even stranger.  There was a large gap between the back end of the night stands and the wall.  Plus this configuration put the front edge of the night stands too far away from the head of the head of the bed. 

If you haven’t figured it out yet, we decided that we needed different bedroom nightstands.  The problem is that none of the designs that we saw would meet our unique requirements.  The nightstands need to reside on the outside of the corner posts, while at the same time being in front of the corner posts. Or in other words, the nightstands needed to be “L” shaped.  I know that may sound strange, but an “L” shaped night stand would have a portion that fits snuggly along the wall, and another portion that would be proud of the corner posts. And if building these nightstands wasn’t a challenge enough, there needed to be a right and a left version of the nightstands. 

My idea was relatively simple.  The outside (away from the bed) would be longer then the inside edges. In fact the inner edges would be short the thickness of the corner posts. The back of the night stand would be shorter then the front, the difference would be the amount the night stand overhung the corner posts.  In a moment of shear stupidity, I toyed with the idea of making the drawers of the night stand follow this same profile, but in a more sane moment decided that the drawers would be traditional rectangle drawers.  After all I wanted to get this project done sometime before I retire. 

To be honest with you, when I suggested an “L” shaped nightstand, my very logical wife looked at me with an expression that said ” Dave, have you been working with paint thinner too long”  or something like that.  But the more I explained my idea she began to embrace the idea.  Hey, if we had a custom headboard, it only seemed right to have custom nightstands to accompany them. 

The nightstands are made from a combination of cherry purchased from a local supplier, and some more of the pallet lumber I scrounged.  The base of the unit is made from a piece of 3/4″ Plywood.  The sides, face and drawer fronts are all made from 4/4 stock, while the actual drawers are made from 1/2″ stock.  The top of both the right and left hand nightstands is make from some 6/4 cherry that I purchased at the same time as the 4/4 stock. 

I choose a different construction method for the sides of the nightstand, than the mortise and tenon joinery that is a feature of a lot of my work.  For this project I used what is known an Cope and Stick or Cope and Rail joinery.   In this method the joinery, there is a profile cut along the inside edge of the rails and stiles. A reversed image of this profile is then cut into the end of the rails only.  This allows the ends of the rails to interlock into the profile milled into the edges of the stiles.

If you look at the profile shown above, you will notice that there is a slot cut into the edges of both the rail and stiles.  The slot will accept the panel of your choosing.  In our original kitchen these were raised panels, in these night stands, they are simple flat panels.  No matter what your panels look like the milling process is always the same.   The rough wood is first dressed with a  pass over the jointer on two adjacent edges, then a trip thought the surface plainer, being mindful of the reference edge of the stock.

Looking at the side profile of the nightstands, you will see what I am calling intermediate stiles.  The differ from the end stiles of the nightstand in that the edge profile is machined into both vertical edges of the stock, where as the end stiles only have the profile machined along one edge.  Another difference is the ends of the intermediate stiles will have the complementary profile cut into them, to allow them to mate with the upper and lower rails.

 

When you are making a cope and stick panel, it is imperative that all you stock be flat, straight, and ALL the same thickness.  Any imperfection in the stock will be amplified when you attempt to join the rails and stiles together.  So the first step in making the panels was to square the stock on the jointer, and then plane it to the correct thickness on the thickness planer. One of the lessons I learned the hard way is to joint and plane for thickness ALL of the stock for the panels at one time.  Even though my thickness planer has factory stops for 1/2″, 3/4″ and 1″ of thickness, they are not perfect.  A build up of sawdust within the planer will change the stops, so unless you are cleaning out the planer after every use, then a good habit to get into is to plane enough stock for all the rails, stiles and intermediate stiles you are going to need.  In fact a even better habit is to plane extra stock as you will need the extra for setup of the cope and stick bits.  I have had to go back and mill extra pieces of stock after the fact, either because I made a mistake or miss counted or my math skills took the day off.  I have found that it is really hard to always get the absolute same thickness of the stock, without a lot of added tweaking of the surface planer.

So my plan of attack was to joint and then plane several lengths of stock, and then rip it to its desired width.  Once you have the stock ripped down then it’s time to get started on the actual machining of the profile along the edge of the rail and stile. The profiles for the cope and stick are cut using a matched set of either router or shaper bits.  When you are using the router bits, they MUST be used with either a router table or a shaper table. These bits are too big to try to ever use them in a hand held router.  And if your router table is not really stable, then I would not recommend trying to use these bits.  The cope and stick bit that I use now, came as a set, one bit for the edge profile and the other for the end profile.  My original cope and stick bit was a one piece bit device.  When you used it, you would stack the components of either profile onto the shaft of the bit. The problem with the one piece style is that it took an awful lot of time just to stack the components in the correct order and orientation, before you get to the fun part of trying to adjust the height of the bit.  The two piece sets cost a little more then the single shaft stackable types.  But when you account for the extra time and frustration that using a single shaft cutter requires, the added cost of the 2 bit sets seems very small.

While it is not really hard to cut either the stile or rail profiles,  it does take a lot of setup time and patience, so I think I will keep that until the next part of this posting.

Related posts:

1. Woodworking Project – Building a Bed Headboard Part 1
2. Woodworking Project – Building a Bed Headboard Part 4
3. Woodworking Project – Wall Clock Part 4
4. Woodworking Project – Arched Top Mirror Part 3
5. Woodworking Project – Building a Bed Headboard Part 3