Guess what?
For the next 12 months
you'll continue to hear your favorite
deep, disembodied voice saying
Microjig
Maker of the GRR-RIPPER
If you want to make a Murphy Bed
you're probably going to want a kit that
contains all the hardware you need.
I bought mine from murphybeds.com
They have several different kinds.
this is the DIY kit.
The kit comes with a set of instructions
showing you haw to build the cabinet,
but as you can see, it's a lot of words
and not a lot of drawings which made it a little tricky.
So I took the liberty to draw up my own set of plans
based on these plans.
You can download these down below.
I can get much more accurate cuts on my tablesaw,
but I can't run huge sheets of plywood through it,
so I need to break it down to rough sizes first.
I'll start by building the cabinet.
The first thing I'm going to do is
put this iron-on edge banding on any of the exposed
plywood edges.
it's made out of real wood and when you iron it on,
it's never coming off.
This time I picked up this trimmer.
It's got a razor blade in there and it should
trim this flush.
After a little sanding, that makes it look like a solid board.
I'm screwing on these L-brackets that attach
to the header and the stretchers to
hold the cabinet together.
They all come in the hardware kit.
To make sure these are right on the end,
I'm butting these up against a scrap board.
I'm spending a lot of time to
measure out carefully where I'm going to
drill all the holes in the side panels for
the lift mechanism.
I was thinking I could just mark one of these
side panels and then just put it on the other one
and drill all the holes at the same time,
but now that I think about it,
I think a better plan is to actually
mark the other board too
because if they are stacked together
and I try to drill through both boards,
there is a strong likelihood that I'm
not going to be completely straight and
that would cause the other holes to be way off.
So I'' just take careful measurements on this side.
I'm using a brad point bit to drill out these holes
to keep it from wandering.
I'll counter sink all these holes on the
outsides of the panels.
I want to clamp this top piece to the sides
so that I can drill crews in there.
I don't have any clamps that are long enough,
but I can hook two of these pipe clamps together.
Now I can drill holes for the special screws
that are going to hold this together.
With those holes drilled and the brackets
installed on the other pieces,
I can take this all apart and I'll assemble it
up in the bedroom.
This part's going to be a little tricky.
I need to join these two pieces of plywood together.
I'm going to put biscuits all along the edge
of each one first.
Okay, that should hold those two pieces together.
And as before, I'm taking really careful measurements
and marking where the lift mechanism goes
on each of the rails.
And I'll drill some really tiny pilot holes through these
using my drill press.
I'm temporarily laying out these bed rails
so that i can drill holes for those special screws
into the ends.
I'm marking all of these corners so that
when I go to assemble this all of the holes
that I've drilled here will line up.
With the head and side rails still clamped down,
I can test the fit on these cleats.
Before gluing and screwing the cleats on the rails
I need to drill holes on two sides.
I'll glue and screw all of these cleats flush
with the bottoms of the rails.
With those all dry, I can screw together all
four of these rail assemblies.
These are the special screws that came with
the hardware kit.
I'll put those into the holes I've already drilled.
With that assembled, I'll carefully move it
out of the way and put some glue down
and screw it down using those cleats.
This is a very cramped room,
but I think it's going to be a lot easier to assemble this
in here rather that trying to bring it into the room.
I'm using these L shaped brackets to
secure the unit into the studs of the wall.
This is the mechanism that's going to raise
and lower the bed.
It gets mounted inside.
The lift mechanism works really well.
Here's how it works.
Lift this up, the legs fold up,
holding the mattress in,
and then it just gently folds up.
I'm really happy with the way that Murphy Bed turned out.
It's going to save us a lot of space in that extra room,
which we don't use that room as a guest room
that often, so what we've been doing is
slowly transforming it into my wife's crafts room.
You may remember the video last year
where I transformed the closet into a
crafts organization center.
And keep watching Woodworking for Mere Mortals
I'll be having more space saving projects for that room
coming up later this year.
Thank you so much for watching this week's episode
of Woodworking for Mere Mortals.
I really do appreciate your support.
Visit the Woodworking for Mere Mortals web site
at ForMereMortals.net where you can post pictures
of your own projects and you can download
free plans and lots of other stuff.
Hey! It's Princess Meow-Meow!