Bed & Board Using Japanese joints and Oregon walnut, Bangor architect crafts project 4 years in the making at EMCC

A Bangor architect has spent the past four years executing one of his own designs. A house, you ask, or an office building? No. It’s a bed. Brian Reading, who lives in Bangor and works at William McHenry Architect in Blue Hill, and his wife, Claire Sullivan, decided they needed a new master bed. He had never built one before, but he had an idea after spying a bed design in an old issue of Home Furniture magazine. It featured a traditional Japanese architectural woodworking joint called sage-kama that holds the rails, stretchers, headboard and footboard together.

The sage-kama, Reading explained, was developed to prevent racking. The joint resembles a tenon whose bottom edge slants downward toward the end. This angle fits into a corresponding angle in the mortise. As the tenon slides diagonally into place, space is left at the top of the mortise where a fitted wedge is then driven.

Reading has built the bed in intermediate woodworking, a continuing education course offered at Eastern Maine Community College in Bangor. As part of the class, Reading can use the college’s wood shop for three hours every Thursday evening.

“The reason I take this class is the unbelievable assortment of large, stationary power tools,” said Reading who used old walnut slabs for the project. “The slabs – the headboard and the footboard – weren’t perfectly flat. So in order to give them some semblance of flatness, the thickness sander worked very nicely.”

Furniture maker Bob Mowdy has taught intermediate woodworking at Eastern Maine Community College for six years, along with woodworking basics, in which novice woodworkers do six projects ranging from a toolbox to a pine hutch. Both courses are given in the fall and spring semesters.

Reading isn’t the only bed maker in the intermediate woodworking class. Don and Lori Samiya of Hermon are constructing a pencil-post bed out of maple mantel stock. The bed design is named for the tall 2-inch-square posts that taper to small blunt ends at the tops. Lori Samiya took the course first and then persuaded her husband to join in.

Also in intermediate woodworking, Greg Howat of Bangor has been building a red oak beaded-panel storage bench based on a design in Woodsmith magazine. He says it’s for his wife and will go in their mudroom. As part of the class, he already has made a desk and an entertainment cabinet.

Reading’s master bed is by far the biggest piece under construction in Mowdy’s class. For the headboard and footboard, the Bangor architect bought Oregon black walnut slabs from a Seattle woodworker who was emptying his basement. The wood was and still is warped.

“I had to fight with that through the whole project,” Reading related. He and Mowdy put the slabs through the thickness sander, but left the natural edges alone. “They’re so beautiful.”

Reading says he stabilized large cracks in the slabs with numerous butterfly joints, which are wooden bow ties fitted precisely into place on either side. Once Reading learned how to make a butterfly joint, he tried to install them all in one class, but it ended up taking three or four.

Reading did much of the woodworking with hand tools. For instance, he used Marples chisels to cut out the mortises.

“You could shave yourself with those,” Mowdy says of the chisels. He showed Reading how to sharpen them.

Reading used a large shoulder plane, made in Warren by Lie-Nielsen Toolworks, to fine-tune the tenons’ thickness. The architect treats the plane as a sort of woodworker’s Excalibur as he lifts it from its brown paper wrapper and lightly scrapes away some excess wood.

Unlike a block plane, the shoulder plane’s blade extends right to the edge, enabling the craftsman to cut a perfectly shaped joint.

“That’s probably the best production plane in the world,” Mowdy remarked, recounting how he once let Reading use his $90 Stanley shoulder plane. “He liked it so much he went and bought a $200 plane.”

“I tend to err on the tight side,” Reading says of his joinery, adding that it’s a bit risky because the forces acting on the rails in his creation could split the bedposts. The wood is also subject to humidity and temperature changes, which argue for a certain amount of wiggle room.

Reading used a drill press to make the initial holes for the mortises in his bed. He also used a “mortiser” for some of the joints. The bit in this modified drill press rotates between four precisely fitted corner gouges that follow its downward stroke.

“It actually drills a square hole!” he exclaimed.

Made of Pennsylvania walnut, the rails and the 4-inch posts are marked to help put the bed together correctly. The bed’s assembly is tricky since none of the pieces is light in weight and Reading’s bedroom is in the attic.

“We can figure this out,” Reading said, trying to assemble the bed in Mowdy’s wood shop. ‘This is the bottom … and … this is the bottom …”

Before taking the newly built bed home, Reading plans to treat it with Sam Maloof’s Poly-Oil finish, a blend of polyurethane varnish and natural oils. He also must decide how to detail the tops of the bedposts. He started cutting an irregular pattern of gouge marks into them, then cut the tops off and started over with shorter posts. What will they look like when finished?

“I still don’t know,” he said.