Here is the original blog post over at Lumberjocks.com
Well my grand concepts finally gave way to practical realities. I wanted to build a bed with minimal to no mechanical fastener that would knock down to a bundle of sticks, easily strapped to the top of a car for when I tossed the kids out into the cold cruel world. I futzed with a bunch of different concepts and built some prototypes, nothing was sticking. So eventually I cried uncle and went with the standard glue and screw and fixed rail ends. Now I’m finally making some progress.
Once I settled on a workable design I had the lumber milled up in a weekend, both ends assembled in another weekend and I’ll likely get it completely assembled and finished in another weekend.
Since this bed is for a teenager not a small child I wanted to beef up the end rails for climbing in and out. I mortised in the end rails, glued them, and put in 4 number 8 wood screws per rail end.
I went with a half box for the end posts for rigidity. I’ve built bunk beds before and a single 2×6 for the end post has been plenty strong enough, but hey, why just build when you can over build.
I put in long rail support blocks, more for ease of assembly than support strength. The blocks give somewhere to set the rails when putting the bed together. The support blocks are glued and screwed to the end posts.
One of the things I was trying to avoid this time was using lag bolts to hold the long rails. Lag bolts are practical, they go in pretty easy, they’re plenty strong, easy to take out for knock down, but they are kind of ugly. I looked at a lot of different knock down hardware and did not find anything that I thought was strong enough or particularly better looking. So given the new theme of actually getting the job done before the kids leave the house I’ll probably go with what I know.
Here’s the sketchup model: Loftbed.