Pencil Post Bed - Getting closer

This weekend was a productive weekend in terms of making some progress on the pencil post bed. I managed to put in the 1/4" filler at the bottom of the rail mortises to fix the little mistake I made last weekend. I glued them up on Friday night and then on Saturday I trimmed down the excess with a small handplane and sanded them flush. I spent an hour or so paring the spacer down to get a good fit on the rail tenons.  With the mortises properly fitted to the tenons on the rails,  I did one last check of the rails and verifed the inner and top faces and marked them accordinly.

I then proceeded to drill and counter bore the bed bolt holes in each of the posts. I laid out the holes taking careful consideration that the difference in thickness of the rails. Using the drill press and the fence on the drill press to make sure that I was accurately centered for each hole, I drilled the larger 1" hole, 7/8" deep and then bored through at 7/16" diameter. The larger hole is for the bed bolt head and the smaller for the 3/8" bolt to slide through. The holes had to be offset so that the bed bolts don't intersect. The holes for the head and foot rails are the same distance down from the top of the rails (1-1/8") as the holes for the side rails are up from the bottom rails.

With the holes drilled in the posts, I bored the hole into the inside of each rail where the bed bolt nut will sit using the drill press using the same 1-1/8" spacing either from the top or the bottom of the rail depending on which rail I was drilling. These holes are 3" back from the end of the rail (excluding the tenon).  These are not through holes, so I used the depth stop on the drill press to prevent going any further then neccessary. I then placed the rail on the top of my worktable and tenon into the post mortise. Then using the hole previously drilled into the post as a guide hole I strarted drilling the 7/16" hole through the end of the rail. I had to finish drilling the hole by without the post as the depth of the hole was pretty much the maximum drill length of the drill bit after the post was removed.

Wi all the holes drilled and tested we moved the parts outside onto the driveway and did our first full assembly with the bed bolts. Mattheus gave me a hand assembling and Shae-Lynn acted as crew foreman. With the bed out of the way and assembled in the driveway I could verify the measurements for the tester frame (the frame that goes around the top of the bed).

After cutting and planing the frame rails and using the dado blade I cut the half lap joints into the ends of both the long rails and the short rails. I cut the dados into the long rails for the two short center rails. Unfortunately it was getting late so we moved the bed into the garage and re-assembled around my work table.  The final frame is shown below.

There is one final piece of woodworking to do before sanding and finishing the bed. I need to cut the profile on the outside of the top of each rail. I still need to purchase the 2 angle iron pieces to go along the inside of the side rails and then cut and plane the poplar cross boards that the mattress sits on. I figure those boards can be created after the rest of the bed is finished unless time presents itself. I'd rather get the finish on the bed before I turn to those pieces since they don't require finishing and can probably be done in an evening or two - I think there is about 20 of them to make.