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Thread: Looking For A Little Design Help

  1. #1
    Join Date
    Dec 2012
    Location
    Southeastern CT
    Posts
    141

    Looking For A Little Design Help

    So I am in the process of designing a bed for the wife finally and can use a little help.

    The headboard is being made out of an 8-panel solid fir 36" door, the footboard another 32" 8-panel door. Posts will be made out of 4x4, likely poplar if you all think it will be strong enough. The bed will be painted white and there will be white wainscoting on the wall on either side of the bed. The goal is to have the bed look like it is a built-in (ie: integral with the wainscoting), but yet be removal if we ever decide the sell the house. The blank space would then be completed with matching wainscoting.

    Additionally the bed needs side rails as our king-sized bed is made of two twins. So I can use a little help in deciding on the size of the rails. I was thinking somewhere around 1 1/4" thick by 10 - 12" or so to match the beefiness of the doors and the posts.

    What do you all think?

    Thanks,

    Mike

  2. #2
    Join Date
    Oct 2008
    Location
    Columbus, OH
    Posts
    3,063
    Mike, I know you didn't really ask about the engineering aspect but I thought I would throw this in for your consideration if you decide to go thinner rails. I like to use Sagulator to help answer questions like the one you posed. Aside from the fit proportionally to the other components, I like to get some scientific basis underneath my design decisions.

    I made an assumption about the length of the rails (7'), but sagulator says that the 1.25" x 10" poplar rails will quite literally hold up a ton of weight. The example I show below I used 500 lbs center loaded on a single rail. In reality the load will be more uniformly distributed across 2 rails. I tried other permutations including 1000 lbs and a floating attachment, and the rating was still acceptable. So, I think it will boil down to whatever you think the best fit is proportionally to the other components.

    sagulator.jpg
    Brian

    "Any intelligent fool can make things bigger or more complicated...it takes a touch of genius and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction." - E.F. Schumacher

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