Saturday, September 12, 2009

A Curly Maple Queen Size Bed


Yesterday, Sam and I delivered a queen size bed to a client in Saratoga Springs. She liked a cherry Sheraton style single bed from our website ... We expanded it to a queen and it all worked out fine ..... The curly maple was particularly nice. Lookin' good now that it's all finished ... Click the photos to enlarge them ...

Will roughed out the legs using our Vega duplicator which he tuned up to produce absolutely INCREDIBLE results right off the cutter. This minimized the time he had to spend cleaning them up after the duplicating process .

That's a four foot one piece shaving from the curly maple posts he turned

Action !! What he did exactly was grind the cutter to a sharp angled point rather than the small radius that comes standard on the diamond cutters. The difference in the results were incredibly dramatic ... the chips flew ...

Trevor made a sample headboard in mdf to confirm the stretched design ..

Drilling the bed post bottoms for the tenons on the turning tops

The bed assembled with the mocked up headboard

Considering the foot post proportions ... good to go
Better photos of the completed bed later ...

2 comments:

Jeff Branch said...

I love curly maple (and this bed). I am working on a project with curly maple. What is your favorite way to finish this wood?

Dorset Custom Furniture said...

Hi Jeff, Typically, we use diluted Lockwood water based stains and do a first coat which we sand aggressively. The second coat, which is the final color, we leave unsanded until the first top coat is applied. After the first top coat we usually add a gel stain layer, then a final topcoat and finally a wipe on/wipe off final coat. We try a lot of different products, always searching for the 'perfect' finish. Don't be hung up on particular brands, but we've had good success lately with Minwax poly both brushing and wiping and also use their gel stains ... If you want more info, send me a direct email and I'll look up the exact recipe for this bed. The link below has some good info. Just skip the distressing part ... http://dorsetcustomfurniture.blogspot.com/2008/11/distressing-post.html