King Bed Headboard - Part 5: Tenons For the Rails, Shaping and Glue-up

Coming into the home stretch.  With the posts mortised, I had to tenon the rails.  These are the widest pieces I've ever put tenons on and that requires an 8" long shoulder cut.  I didn't want the saw to wander, so I used a batten with one square corner clamped to the work-piece to guide my cut.

Pressing the saw plate against the side of the batten

I placed the batten about 1/32" past the knife line.  After the shoulders were cut, I removed the tenon waste by splitting most of it away and following up with a variety of methods.  Later, I chiseled the shoulder to the knife line.

Did I mention that working with very long stock presents challenges?  At first I clamped the rail to the benchtop and split off the waste with a chisel held horizontally.  But it was tough to see what was going on, so I changed tack and clamped the rail at an angle in the vise.

Splitting off the waste

There was one snafu: I wasn't careful enough at one point and when the waste split away it knocked a chip off the show face of the rail.

Nasty chip out of the rail's front face

Remarkably I was able to find the exact chip and glue it back on.  I'll always know this "defect" is there, but I'm sure nobody else will notice.

Chip glued back on and surface cleaned up - almost like it never happened

After splitting off most of the tenon waste, I chiseled cross-grain to get it close to the layout lines and followed up with a router plane to get a consistent level.

Chiseling to the layout lines

Router plane to make the depth consistent

It's very important to develop the skill to level a tenon cheek with a chisel alone.  One of my rails had a low spot (in its thickness) on the back side in the location of the tenons, extending about 8" along the length of the rail.  That meant the back face of that rail was not parallel with the front face.  If I tried to level the tenon cheek with a router plane, it would just follow the contour of the low spot, resulting in a tenon that was thinner one side than the other.

Later, I used a smoothing plane for final fitting of the tenons to the mortises.  An old wooden skewed rabbet plane helped me get into the corners.

Final fitting using a #4

After the tenons were cut, I dry-assembled the rails with a few slats so that I could transfer the mortise locations in the posts to the tenons on the rails.

Marking the tenon extents directly from the post mortises

Another view

Extended the lines, marked the waste and cut the tenon shape

There was still a lot of fitting to do.  One joint I had a hard time getting to seat.

Just won't seat!  Open by about 1/32"

I checked the shoulders - they were clean and either 90° or slightly undercut.  I checked the mortises - they were deep enough to take the tenons.  So I did the sensible thing and called it a day.  When I got to it the next day, I found the problem quickly and got the joint finished - there was something on a mortise end-wall that was holding it off.

First dry-fit of all joints

With all the joints fitting right, I could get to shaping.  Not much to it here - a curve on the top rail, a chamfer on top and bottom of the posts and a slight rounding of all edges.  The curve had its challenges.  The radius for the curve is 18', 1-1/4".  I thought about having my wife hold a tape measure that distance away from the top center of the rail and marking the circle with her as the center.  In the end, I used Sketchup to get the locations of a few points on the rail to draw a curve through.

First column should read "From Center of Rail"

Using a flexible stick to connect the points

Then I sawed off the waste, keeping the curved off-cuts for use as clamping cauls later, and planed to the lines.

Planing to the lines was easy with a smoother

Laying out and cutting the chamfers was straight-forward.

Layout lines for the 3/8" chamfer on a post

Chiseled away most of the waste, then smoothed to the lines with a plane

Before gluing up, I finish planed all surfaces and scraped any areas that required a little bit more.  I practiced the glue-up at least twice, being very worried about getting it done before the glue started to set.  In the previous post I wrote about possibly draw-boring to pull the rails and posts together.  In the end I decided not to do that, thinking I could clamp the headboard well enough using ratchet straps.  Now that it's done, I feel like I was a bit light on the glue, so I hope I don't regret that decision.

The first rehearsal for glue-up
(Note the clamping cauls atop the upper rail)

Taped these blocks to the posts at each joint

The helper blocks not only keep the posts from being bruised by the strap, but also they have a shallow dado cut in them to allow the strap to fit and be captured with the swiveling lock.  That allowed me to do this by myself - trying to wrestle the ratchet straps into position would have been tough without these blocks.  And I knew time would be critical during this large glue-up.

Here it is glued up, standing on the floor

In the end, the glue-up went well.  Preparation is not underrated!

Next time: adding a finish and installation.