The adventures of a modern day Luddite

Drainpipe kayak

Quite a while back I came across an article about a man building a “kayak” out of PVC pipe, which looked fun. So I thought I had to give it a go, now being in the UK and not the US getting hold of random bits of PVC pipe in large sizes is a lot trickier, and also I wanted to use it in the Forth ( because why wouldn’t I ). Research was therefore called for, and whilst there are quite a few videos and articles about building such craft they’re all rather scant on detail.

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My First bed

I recently had the opportunity to build a bed from scratch, which was fun and I learnt a lot – this is roughly how it went.

The Requirements

Build a bed tall enough to store deep lidded really useful boxes under it in three months ( minus the day job, visits to Fife and other important commitments ).
So a nice broad brief and only a teensy bit of time pressure.

The Design

I did initially consider building the frame out of scaffolding for that rugged industrial look but decided that I’d have more fun building it from wood. Also aesthetically the room really isn’t a scaffolding sort of room. With that complex decision out-of-the-way I promptly decided to build the frame out of oak using new untreated railway sleeper for the bed posts. It was at this stage that I realised that I could actually make the bed king sized and thus actually long enough for me, this was a great revelation. The rest of the “formal” design process involved creating two very rough 3D models in Daz3d. This was partly to work out what timber I actually needed, compare two options and to get feedback on the design. They were not very complex models (though all of the timbers are to scale, just not well put together or touching the floor).

Wing back headboard
Wing back headboard
Slimline bed
Slimline bed

Really the only difference was which way round the bedposts went, but given the size of the bedposts that would make a significant difference to the width of the bed, because of this I sadly couldn’t go for the wing back design if I wanted a king size bed. With that problem solved a few other design choices were quickly made:

  1. There would be niches in the head-board posts to hold a mug/glass or a mobile phone, with routing for charger cables.
  2. There would be a USB hub in the back of the head-board for the routed cables to plug-in.
  3. If possible it would have built-in reading lamps
  4. It was going to be built from solid oak
  5. I wasn’t going to use varnish, screws or nails.

At this point I hadn’t actually paid that much attention to the time frame I had to build it in (82 days).
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