Solid Mango Wood Bed

Details

A platform bed in solid mango, Mangifera indica, with a frame and panel headboard, a centre rail carried on floor legs and a 15-slat deck. The headboard is where a solid wood bed is usually not solid wood, because a wide flat panel in solid timber will split as it moves through the seasons, so the trade fits an MDF or plywood panel, calls the whole bed solid wood and finishes over the difference. Ours is frame and panel: solid stiles and rails with solid panels floating loose in a groove, free to expand and contract, which is the joinery answer to that exact problem and the reason the technique was invented. The second cheat is the slat deck. Gaps wider than 75 mm let a foam mattress sag between the slats and void nearly every mattress warranty written, and a bed shipped with nine slats across six and a half feet has gaps well over 100 mm. The third is the rail joint, where four screws driven into end grain go slack inside a year and cannot be pulled up again.

• Solid Mangifera indica throughout, including the headboard panels, no MDF and no plywood
• Frame and panel headboard with floating panels, so seasonal movement has somewhere to go
• 15 slats, 70 mm wide, 22 mm thick, gaps of 66 mm, under the 75 mm limit a foam mattress needs
• Centre rail with two floor legs on the queen and three on the king, so no slat spans the full width unsupported
• Side rails joined with bolt-through steel hook plates, because a bed has to come apart to get up a staircase, and a steel hook plate is the right answer where a glued tenon is not
• Deck rated 350 kg uniformly distributed
• Kiln-dried to 8 to 10 percent under IS 287, waterborne finish under 50 g per litre VOC, IS 9873 Part 3 tested
• Ships flat in four cartons and takes about 40 minutes to build with the spanner supplied. A bed that shipped assembled would not fit through most Indian doorways.