bed - live edged cherry

King sized bed. Primary wood is cherry, secondary is basswood and pine. Keys are lightly spalted rock maple. This was my first time dealing with large live edge slabs, and nearly half the time on this project was spent dealing with those – flattening, smoothing, etc. First time doing butterfly keys too.

The design is my own, sized to fit plenty of roll-out storage bins underneath, which will be a whole other project.

The headboard is ~16” wide and cupped dramatically while drying. I decided to use this piece anyway, since the convex outer surface would work well and be easy enough to process. But it required some smoothing out of the concave side, so I made a plane to accomplish that.

I usually come up with a little twist to the design midway through a project – some angle or curve that elevates things. Here, the posts for the headboard were originally straight, but I decided that the top half should be angled back a bit. So they are mitered at 5º. That joint is reinforced with 5 biscuits (4 in the middle, 1 along the back like a spline) and a mitered butterfly key. The key really draws that joint tight and complements the keys in the slab.

Everything is screwed or bolted together for complete disassembly. the head/foot boards are drived with lag screws, and I made some false through tenon end caps (in end grain with sap/heartwood matched exactly to the board!) to cover those. They are held in place by rare earth magnets attracted to two sunken in philips head screws around the lag screw counterbore.

The slats are wormy basswood, kept in place with spacers and screws. The gap between them is 2.7”, which is sufficient to support the foam mattress. There are 3 center legs… overkill, but the whole bed is very solid – even more so than my previous metal bed frame.

Here are some more pics: