The joinery was an important aspect of the design. To get four-poster beds as tall as this through doorways and up and down stairs, it’s typically necessary for the headboard, footboard, and rails to be separable from the posts. As a result, you commonly find exposed bed bolts on these beds, a look I definitely wanted to avoid. To make the bed rock-solid yet completely knockdown without visible hardware, I crafted a joinery system that combines slip tenons with steel bolts and buried screw plates.

I made the slip tenons and their bolt hardware. After I thicknessed the slip tenons, rounded over their edges, and cut them to length, I drilled a hole for the bolt.

At the tablesaw, I cut a notch in the slip tenons for the screw plate.

Before gluing the slip tenons into the posts, I epoxied the screw plates into their notches. To do so, I put a bolt through the slip tenon and threaded it into the screw plate, then used quick-set epoxy to adhere the screw plate into its notch. Once the plate was secure, I unscrewed the bolt and let the epoxy cure.

While the epoxy dried, I drilled the long bolt holes into the ends of the horizontal members. I used an extra slip tenon (with no screw plate) to guide the hand drill. I next did the same with the posts, inserting an extra slip tenon and using it as a guide to drill a 1⁄4-in.-deep hole for the end of the bolt. With that done, I glued the real slip tenons into their posts with yellow glue.

Lastly, I template-rout the T-slot. The template’s end stop perfectly positions the T-slot. To center the template, a groove between the end blocks fits over a length of threaded rod temporarily inserted in the bolt hole.

T-shaped slots on the inside face of the rails and footboard and on the back face of the headboard allow you to insert and tighten the bed bolts. To cut the T-slots, I used a router jig and a guide bushing.

-This is an excerpt from Jeremy’s article “Build a contemporary pencil-post bed” in Fine Woodworking 282.

 

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