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Properly bent

Right, Saturday morning so on with steambending the second upright.

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Mise en place all done. Now, on with the polythene tube…

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And now put the compression strap in place, clamp it at one end and get the “start bend here” line matched up with the initial straight part of the jig.

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I’ve just clamped the end block here temporarily, I’ll remove those before steaming and reclamp them before bending (I want the excess water to be able to drain out of the tube readily, and it can’t do that when the end is pinched by the clamps).

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The idea here is to prevent that end block from twisting out and away from the piece because if it does, the compression strap won’t be in compression and the outside of the piece will splinter.… Read the rest

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Platform and salvage

Honestly, I wasn’t sure I’d get this done by today, but I seem to be getting faster at chopping mortices, if not actually at marking them up. And it fits. There’s a small amount of twist here and there, I think I can straighten it out for the final assembly and then pin the tenons to help keep them flat (and it’ll look cool as well, little white ash pin dots along the walnut frame). The two long front and back rails are tilted with respect to each other, that will have to be planed away on the bottom but I’ll keep it on top as it gives a kind of lip to help keep the mattress centered which is nice.

 

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And then it was time to take the frame out of the drying form and see how bad the springback would be and how bad the splintering was and if it was salvageable…img_0010aRead the rest

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More stock prep

So while waiting for the steambent walnut to dry, I got on with the mattress platform. First up, ripping out laths for the remaining crossmembers and prepping them.

Is it me or is stock prep the most common hand tool job of all?

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I had an end piece of ash about two feet long that wasn’t going to be doing much else, so I chose that for the crosspieces. I wanted to get four out of it, a bit thinner than the walnut crossmembers for the visual look, but not too much thinner.

Then, once I had them ripped out, I had to thickness them down by a quarter inch or so. Four of them. In other words, I turned a 2″x1″x2′ length of ash completely into shavings. Even with Sid, it sucked.… Read the rest

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