question for Stoutman and others- bed making

Hey Stoutman or others, I began making a bed similar to the Stickley bed you made earlier this year. I am making it from cherry and there are some differences to your desgn. The slats in the head and foot boards are 1/2 inch thick,

2 inch wide. I'm planning to cut motises in the headboard & footboard rails to accept these slats but I can't decide if I should make them the same size as the slats so the slats slide right in or if I should make them smaller and cut tenons in the ends of the slats. The latter approach would not show any edge of the mortise and might be easier and quicker to facilitate but I'm concerned that the tennons would be too thin if I stayed with 1/2 inch material. How did you secure your slats?Any comments on this? Thanks, Marc
Reply to
marc rosen
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Very good question. I struggled with this also and asked the group. I was torn between using biscuits or tenons (floating or integral) and I decided on biscuits (#20). Only time will tell if I made a mistake. We (woodworkiers) tend to over engineer things, is a tenon overkill for a slat or is a biscuit aqequate? I am banking on a biscuit being adequate for the task.

If you are going to go through the trouble of making mortises you might want to make tenons.

Good luck!

Reply to
Stoutman

I didn't answer your question regarding your slat width. With 1/2" slats you could take 1/8" off each face and that would give you 1/4" tenons. I think that would be fine.

Reply to
Stoutman

My bed that I built, from Cherry, doesn't have seperated slats per se. Instead they form a solid panel using T&G so I really had no choice but to put dado's in the top and bottom rails to accept the 1/2" thick pieces. That said, I did cut tenons if you will, on the individual pieces so they slid into the dado but stopped at the shoulder. I think you could go either way but I've found that by making the mortise/tenon thinner/smaller than the slat, you cover up any mistakes made while mortising. Cheers, cc

Reply to
James "Cubby" Culbertson

I concur. A 1/4" cherry tennon will be plenty strong. The slats prove some rigidity, but they are not doing the heavy lifting from a structural perspective.

-Steve

Reply to
C & S

Reply to
marc rosen

Just a tuppence, having build quite a bit in this style:

The only method with misson/A&C style slats that I've ever balked against was the cheesy one of cutting a dado the length of the aprons and using spacers in between the slats ... usually a very fussy shortcut, and being much harder to hide the fact that you took one (shortcut).

All the other methods (traditional M&T, loose tenons, biscuits) will generally give you a much better appearance (with cutting the mortises the same size as the slats probably last on the list of the remaining methods, appearance wise, only because it can also be a fussy proposition getting that perfect fit on every single slat/mortise).

While there is nothing wrong with using other methods, chances are you will be happier with both the results of using tenons on the slats, and with the knowledge that what you used was a time honored, traditional method that goes along with the style.

Also, since it is not absolutely necessary to glue tenoned slats into their respective mortises when done properly (batch cutting the tenons without changing tool setup goes a long way to a square fit), the glue-up of the assembly can be considerably easier, a big consideration on a large, one man project.

Reply to
Swingman

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