DIY Cherry American Girl Doll Bunk Bed

Finished Product up front

Design

My niece has a few American Girl Dolls and my mother thought it would be nice for her to have a bed to put them in. She had originally bought a friend of the family a bed about a decade ago so we got a hold of it and I took some measurements.

Made a more detailed drawing after finishing here, but I built off the above sketch and adjusted as I went.

Build

First step was to get all the pieces cut to size. For the side rails and headboard I used 4/4 cherry planed down to just over 1/2". The bedposts were 6/4 so about 1-1/4" when all cleaned up.

After that I added some curves to the rails and headboard. To do this I just printed out a nice arc on a few sheets of paper, put down some painters tape on the wood and used some Super 88 adhesive to glue the pattern down. This makes it a ton easier to remove later on without having to plane the boards down or remove the adhesive from the wood.

Then I used a jigsaw to cut out the pattern and cleaned them up on the disc sander. 

For the other pieces I traced the first board to the others and rough cut the shape with the jig saw then used the first board as a pattern with my router table and flush trim bit. I didn't have any carpet tape or double sided tape so I made due here with painters tape, it worked pretty well only had one piece slide on me, but that was pretty easy to clean up.

Using the jigsaw first definitely helped as a spiral cut router bit isn't great at hogging out material.

Oh and I lied I actually didn't plane down the boards until after I had shaped them, they just felt very bulky at this point. After planing them down I rounded all the edges.

Dry fitting to look at proportions and to see how large the support for the mattress has to be.

Decided it was a tad bit too wide so ended up cutting off some of the headboards.

At this point I decided I wanted to age the cherry a bit since it was pretty light, so I used a baking soda/water solution to help it darkened the wood a few shades which looked pretty nice, it'll continue to age/darken over time. Wish I had some before/after shots but whoops!

Next was to let the pieces sit for a few months... because I did other projects and wasn't sure how I wanted to do the attachments. I "settled" on just screwing it together and putting caps over the screws... and when I went to buy the screws I accidentally bought a doweling/loose tenon jig instead (beadlocker pro)

after drilling approximately 8000 holes I dry fitted the pieces

Going forward I think I might drill the holes a bit deeper next time as there were some minor gaps in the final fit-up that I think I missed during the initial dry-fit. Also need to take care in making sure everything is squared up when drilling, some of the leg "mortises" were off by a little bit as those took a bit of finagling to clamp in

Finish

Looks good! After looking at all the tiny crevices and corners I decided it'd be easier to apply the finish before assembly. I used Arm-R-Seal gloss for a few coats until I had a nice even surface finish and then applied satin for the final sheen. Going with gloss first helps bring out the figure without muddying it at all.

I think I might have to take back any bad things I've ever said about cherry after this project, super nice to work with and without the stereotypical "cherry" stain it's actually a very beautiful wood with an interesting grain.

Assembly

Glue up was a bit hectic, might have to get some Titebond III for the longer set time in the future so I don't feel as rushed.

Overall it worked fairly well, there are a few small gaps in the joints as I don't think I tightened down the clamps enough but everything is very rigid and stable so it shouldn't be an issue unless someone my size sat on it and rocked around a bunch... but for little kids and dolls it should last quite a few years.

The happy "customer"

Misc. Kitching Stuff April

Walnut wine glass holder/shelf. 

Didn't take any in progress shots really... whoops

Basic outline of dimensions though a few of these were adjusted on the fly to make things look "right" top boards looked a bit "thick" so they ended up being 5/8" thick instead of 3/4" (I think). Everything besides the horizontal rails going into the sides are glued, I used pocket screws (plugged with walnut dowels) for those attachments.

On the wall:

Bought a knife for my lunches at work and found out it didn't come with a sheath or anything to protect the blade. While I was waiting for a glue up to dry I made this. Just two pieces of 1/4" walnut glued together with a dado-ish slot in the center.

Be careful with belt sanders kids, I took off a good chunk of skin shaping this one.

"3D" Maple, Cherry, and Walnut End Grain Cutting Board

Finished Product(s)

Original Design

Smaller board is the same thing, just 3/4" stock with 1/2" square pieces of walnut

Construction

First step is to cut all the strips ~15" long, this measurement should be board thickness plus blade kerf (1-1/2"+3/32") times the number of times you're using the pattern (8) plus a little bit of fluff. I like to get an extra full strip in just in case one comes out wonky plus the last cross cut is always a bit precarious. 

Clamped all the segments together. However, on the smaller board, I did just the walnut to cherry (or maple I don't remember) first and then glued the remaining piece in after to experiment with which one worked better... honestly they both had some gaps but the "all at once" configuration seemed to work slightly better, but that could have been because the pieces were larger and probably a bit more forgiving with slight inaccuracies.

After setting up all the pieces in the correct edge pattern (bottom edge is the left edge in the CAD drawing)

Glued everything together and used some braces to help ensure it was as flat as possible, this pattern is much less forgiving than my other end grain boards since if you plane too much off the crisp corners will no longer line up properly.

After everything had dried, cross cut the segments, this cut will be the height of the final board, 1-1/2", the cut shown is the reason I like having some extra fluff so that I have a longer bottom edge so my cut is more likely to be straight.

Glue everything together for the final glue up (I think this was glue-up #8 for this board, and with the other method this would have been glue-up #12). The pattern is actually the same on both sides just a mirror image so the first four strips are one side and just flip the other four the opposite direction.

After glue up I take the whole board to my 4x36" belt sander to get it flat and to remove any inconsistencies in the glue up, I'll also put the edges through the table saw to straighten those out with a super shallow cut... but I never remember to take pictures of that process.

For the handles I used two stop blocks on my router table and a 1/2" straight cut bit, used the right block as a guide to feed the board in, slide it to the left and back it out when you hit that block, then clean up the front edge by making another shallower pass.

Did each handle in 3 passes to minimize tear out/burning.

And this is the result (kind of) I noticed that the far edges of the handle were pretty thin and didn't want them chipping out easily so I widened it up by another 1/4 of an inch or so to avoid that. These were kind of a pain to sand smooth down the road so I'm not certain this is going to be my default handle style, but it does look nice.

To route the juice groove I brought out the hand held router with an edge guide and bull nose bit, had to drop the RPMs on the router to avoid the maple and cherry burning. Again multiple shallow passes and keep the router moving to avoid burning... maple likes to burn...

At some point in the process I noticed that even when wetting the surface the cherry and maple were very similar in color and the pattern wasn't popping much, I threw some baking soda/water mix on to darken up the cherry, but it ended up darkening both the maple and cherry... which I read it wouldn't do soooo whoops.

Anyway here is the board wet down between raising the grain and sanding.

Soaking in some oil 

and the finished product

The smaller board is basically the same exact process just... smaller. I also didn't add handles on it since it's a bit lighter than the 8lbs this board weighs in at. The only other difference is it's about 1" thick, which is a bit shy of what I've read the minimum should be for this type of board should be due to warping, but hopefully it'll hold up.

I think the proportions work a bit better here for the illusion too, so I'll probably adjust the larger board a bit if I ever make another one of these.

DIY Tiger Maple Ergodox Keyboard Wrist Rests

Finished Product

These things have been around my shop for longer than I care to admit. Originally a friend of mine brought the idea up to me around January of 2016 and after a few failed attempts, throwing in the towel multiple times, fudging around with how to actually build them they got made 11 months later...

So the first attempt at starting these was in June, the biggest issue I had was that the rest needed to be an inch tall and I wanted to make these out of tiger maple... which was all 3/4" thick.

I had to stack at least 2 pieces to get the right height, initially I was going to cut the patterns out and just carve out the bottom portion 1/4" to make up the difference... that went not so great

 Painters tape and Super 77

Rough cut and starting sanding the curves

Looking good but we need that 1/4" extra depth...

This... was kerfing with my miter saw and it's depth stop isn't nearly as exact or consistent as what I can do on a table saw... which I didn't have at the time. It actually cleaned up decently well but depth was all over the place and things just weren't really great out of flat etc.

This got set to the side for way too long. Actually it turned out well that it was as the wood dried a bit more and started to cup so I had to toss them.

Justin Gets New Tools!!!

So after this was thrown to the side for most of the summer, I acquired a table saw and a thickness planer which allowed me to take a different approach. I planed some boards down to 1/2" and stacked them after doing the same process of getting the right shapes. 

So many shavings!

So here we are finally the right height and shaped correctly. The rests were shaped with a belt sander and a lot of patience. If I were to make more of these I'd have to figure out a way to use a jig and my router which would probably save a ton of time.

Finish was done with a few layers of Gloss Arm-R-Seal to make the tiger pop a bit and then 2 layers of Satin to get the final finish I wanted.

My super fancy temperature controlled finishing area for when my garage gets into the 40s w/o the heater running (aka my bathroom with the fan running).

After doing the top and confirming the correct angle I glued on some supports to tilt the rests at a 15 degree angle and put some satin Arm-R-Seal on the bottom. I wasn't worried about the grain popping as much so I didn't do the initial 2 coats of gloss, just 3 coats of satin to seal it.

Hopefully he enjoys them, he sure did wait long enough for 'em