DIY Modern Plywood Platform Bed Part 1 : Frame & Nightstand Build - Woodworking

Hey, I just had an idea. Let's build a modern plywood platform bed. So, this is not a very difficult build. It's all just straight line rips and cross cuts. In fact, if you had the time and patience, you could probably build this entire thing with a circular saw, speed square, a drill, and a sander. As it turns out though, we were on a pretty tight deadline for this build, so we didn't have time. And luckily, what I lack in patience, I make up for in table and miter saws. Anyhow, so while this wasn't a very difficult build, it was a very repetitive build. Let me explain what's going on and you'll understand what I mean. Oh, and by the way, when I say we, I'm talking about myself and Johnny Brook from Crafted Workshop, who I collaborated with on this project. More on that later. So, after we had broken our plywood sheets down into more manageable pieces, we started ripping out all the strips that we'd need. So, we ripped, and ripped, and ripped, and ripped. We literally ripped from day to night. Don't believe me? Then I present Exhibit A, the setting sun. Not a special effect. While I'm ripping, let me mention that this was my first time using Purebond plywood. This is their three quarter inch maple variety, and it was fantastic. Every bit as good as anything else I've used. It's made in America, and personally speaking, best of all to me. It's readily available at Home Depot. I get quite a few questions about where I get my plywood, and until now, my answer has always been a local lumber retailer. So, it'll be really nice to finally be able to give an answer that's actually useful to people who don't live within a 20 mile radius of me. Anyhow, as we finished up all the ripping, we noticed it had become night, so we called it a day. The next day, we got to work bright and late morning, and started cross-cutting out all of our pieces to their finished length. Johnny showed me this simple jig that you can just screw down to your worktop, which was awesome because not only does it make cutting repetitive pieces simple, but it lets you find a positive stop for pieces that actually extend out past your surface, like you see in this shot. By the way, I know I'm skipping over all the dimensions in this video, but we're building this to fit a full-sized mattress. Obviously, you could adapt it for any mattress, but if you want the exact dimensions, we'll put a plan on Johnny's website, and my Patreon members will have access to a Sketchup file. And I'll throw some links below if you're interested in either of those. With all of our pieces cut to their finished lengths and widths, we could finally start putting things together. So next, we started gluing up the major components that will eventually come together to make this thing a bed. Actually, let's cut to a drawing so I can explain how it all works. The entire bed and nightstands are made up of 10 individual sections. 5 for the base and 5 for the platform. That's what I'm calling them. I know I said that I'm not going to talk about dimensions, but we ripped all of the base and platform pieces to 7 inches wide, except for these two base pieces that go under the nightstands. Those are 4 inches, I think. So each of the base sections is a simple stack of 4 pieces of plywood, all cut to the exact same size and glued together. The platform pieces are a series of 4 shorter pieces and 4 longer pieces. The shorter pieces are 14 inches shorter than the long pieces, so that the long pieces overhang by 7 inches on either side. Or so that the overhang is the same size as the width of all the pieces. 7 inches. Because of this, you end up with what is essentially a giant finger joint, I guess it would be. And here you can see how everything fits together. By insetting the base pieces, you end up with this ledge on the inside perimeter for setting the slats to support the mattress on top of. You could do this any number of ways, but I just used more plywood to rip a bunch of slats and made these two sort of upside down T pieces to support the spans. Alright, back to the gluing. So the only real trick here is that we glued from the bottom up, going one layer at a time and finish nailing from the underside, which made it quick and easy to assemble everything. You can see we made this little spacer jig to make the gluing more foolproof. And if I were going to do this again, I actually wouldn't use this. I would just cut the long pieces about a half inch longer than they should be, and that way you'd end up with 7 and a quarter inches of overhang instead of 7 on either side, and you could quickly just sand things flush after. The jig can help you in theory, but if it's a little bit off, what you're doing is essentially compounding that error over and over each time you do another layer. I think it's easier to just eyeball it. Other than that, just make sure to pay attention to which pieces should have a long piece on top and which pieces should have short pieces on top. And actually, that's kind of the repeating theme of this build. Every process is super simple. It's just that you have a lot of pieces, and they're all kind of similar. So there's a lot of opportunities to mix things up. So the more you can really keep organized, the better off you'll be. So we were pretty good about keeping all the pieces aligned while we were gluing up, but there's always going to be a few boards that are a little bit off. So the next thing I did was use a belt sander to make quick work of any discrepancies, and then we could dry fit everything together. When we did the first dry fit, we noticed that it's actually pretty hard to knock the pieces together. There's a lot of friction. So rather than struggle with that, I took some Johnson's paste wax and slathered it between all the fingers. I pretty much just went around the perimeter because it'd be way too difficult to try to cover every little square inch in there, and it made a huge difference. Before, you could barely get the pieces together with a mallet, and after, if you really wanted to, you could probably just get it together with hand strength. So next, we put everything together and drilled out some holes that we could insert some long screws into. If you really wanted to, you could find a way to do this from the bottom to hide the screws, but these are actually fairly nice looking, so we put them on top. Also, it's just way simpler to assemble and disassemble this way. I'd like to take a second to thank all of my Patreon members. New to the list this month are Chris Elkington, Chris Marsh, The Wood Pastor, David Lenz, Joseph Abenheim, Tim Knowles, Brian McHugh, Clayton Davis, Warren Easton, Greg Schultes, Valthor Freyr Thresin, Eric Shanks, Dave Bees, and last but not least, Richard Engstrom from Engstrom Design. If you're digging these videos, and you want to support the show too, and maybe pick up a couple of goodies like a 4ICE t-shirt, check out the Patreon link in the description. And as always, no pressure. The next morning, we started putting everything together for the final assembly. Here, I'm putting together the base pieces by using some metal L brackets on the inside corners of the front. They hold it together, but there's so much leverage towards the head of the bed, that if you move the pieces, they can easily bend the bracket. So basically, these aren't going to close your gaps for you. You're still going to need to make sure that you manually move the pieces to the right angles to make sure that the gaps are closed. Then, on the back side, we joined the headboard base pieces using some straight brackets. Next, we brought in all of the platform pieces and reassembled everything. You'll notice here that there's still huge gaps in the base pieces at this point, but once we get the headboard in, we can position everything just right, and then screw all of the base and platform pieces to the headboard, which will kind of lock everything together relatively. And then once the slats are in, that'll really hold everything together. Speaking of the headboard, next we brought that in and started planning out how we wanted to pattern our LED lights. You'll notice that I'm sort of glossing over that and not really showing any of the building of the headboard, and that's because it's all in another video over on Johnny's channel, Crafted Workshop. I'm going to put a link in the description below and at the end of this video, so make sure that you check it out and definitely subscribe if you're not already. You know, it's funny. While we were building, Johnny and I were talking about how you'd think that bringing together two woodworkers would result in a better outcome than one could achieve on their own. But in reality, that's not the case. Don't get me wrong. There are definite trade-offs. For example, when you're flying solo, you're more accurate, more focused on the ending, and nine times out of ten, you probably get the job done more quickly and efficiently. But when you're with someone else, while it might be a little slower, you tend to enjoy the process more, and you're more likely to try out new things and experiment with different techniques. So in that sense, it's not that dissimilar to something else you can do... in bed. Thanks for watching, and if this was your first time to my channel, welcome! If you liked what you saw, go ahead and make sure to hit that subscribe and like button. Thanks! See you next time.