Bed rail thickness

I'm in the process of building the Craftsman style bed from Wood Magazine a couple of issues ago. FWIW the plans call for 1 1/4 inch rails and angle iron bolted to the inside to hold the matress. This is going to be one heavy bed. Good Luck Mike in Arkansas

Actually a queen size bed generally does not have a central support as does a king size so the side rails need to take the full weight of the matress/boxspring plus occupants . Not considering "dynamic" loads.

So I would go for a little better than 4/4". Perhaps a glued stringer attached to the lower inside of the rails rather than angle iron might be a good solution .

by the way there is a good article in the latest FWW , it is worth a look, I have built many beds in the past and the artical offers good advice .....mjh

Ideally the load is straight down, so thickness is less important than width. In reality, as we either know, or, if elderly, fondly recall, the bed is often stressed in odd directions as well.

A 1 1/8" square strip glued on a 5 1/2" wide rail which has some provision made to keep the rails from spreading should work here. Mine are pegged slats, but other methods are possible.

cherry

There is a twisting force since the mattress(occupant) weight is cantilevered from one side of the rail. Width is the most important dimension but thickness is critical too. I recently made a queen sized cherry bed (see ) and used 1 1/2 inch by 5 inch rails with three angle brackets on each side to support the mattress. It is rock solid but I wouldn't go any smaller than 1

TWS

tubasix.

"George" wrote in news:41c8199a$1 snipped-for-privacy@newspeer2.tds.net:

Those are almost exactly the dimensions I used for my daughter's bed. I made dovetail slots in the inner rail for the mattress support slats. She has no box spring, so I have about 10 cross slats to support the mattress evenly.

I was wondering, how much bounce if any is attributed to the use of slats? The reason I ask, is that I've been considering the construction of a platform bed. Naturally, the mattress will be on a flat surface and I'm wondering if I'd notice the lack of slats and the accompanying lack of bounce. I like the bounce part of it and I'm thinking of trying to find some what to incorporate slats into a platform bed, at least in the centre portion of it. Opinions?

Oh, they bounce. Sometimes the bounce out. DAMHIKT.

The more support the better. Strength quadruples when you cut the span in half.

My design of King sized and smaller uses 6x1 pine with 2x1 bearer doweled/glued on the inside, for the king size I make a 6x1 (flat) with

niel.

Ha Ha! I once bounced one out. I didn't kill the dog that was under the bed but it knocked it out cold. I was pulling out what I assumed was a dead dog while wife went to get a cardboard burial box when it started to twitch. It was never quite the same though :>) Mike in Arkansas