Atelier Lalonde
Paul Lalonde's Weblog

A few weekends ago I had some fellow re-enactors over to build some bedframes.
We’ve been trying to bring our re-enactment up a notch in the last couple of years, and are hoping to approach the “zero-foot rule” this year. That means that our cots and futons are disappearing, even from our private tents, to be replaced by proper beds.

The difficulty is that there is very little evidence of bed construction circa 1372 in northern europe. Most surviving beds are renaissance affairs and unlikely to have much in common (visually) with those of a hundred years earlier. We can say a couple of things though: pretty much all the beds of the period that we see drawn are completely covered with draperies and bed spreads. We can sometimes see a little leg, or corner posts on canopy beds (which are above our stations…).

We’ve chosen to use a construction method that would not look alien to a carpenter of the era. We’re basically building an over-sized clamped-front chest. It’s a sturdy construction that allows for wood movement and is fairly efficient of materials. Furthermore, the construction is easy to make break-down for transport, a boon to reenactors everywhere.

The biggest departure we’ve made is in material. We’ve chosen to use cedar instead of the ubiquitous oak. Oak would have easily doubled the weight of the finished product, and trippled the construction cost - white and red oak are not native to this part of the world. As is, we were able to get some good quality red cedar from a local sawmill at a good price, and used it. With some stain it won’t be immediately obvious that the wood is off, and with some decent fabrics to drape the beds they should look pretty good.

We were 6 in the shop for a day and a half, working from rough lumber to finished joinery. I was the only experienced woodworker, and we all got to finish our joinery and end the weekend with beds.

Here are some photos of the process.
We processed a lot of lumber - lots of 2x8 and 2x6 for legs and rails, and a pile of 1x4 for slats. Mark is showing great form feeding stock.
The most mind-numbing job was planing all the stock. Here Karen, Barbara and Brenda have taken over the planer.
Karen is squaring up some edges.
Modern technology has a place - routing out the 32 mortices we made that day was a lot quiker than doing it by hand.
There is room for hand work, even in production. Here Barbara is splitting the cheeks off a tenon, then planing the modern tool marks off the surface. Without this critical step all the finishing on earth won’t hide the electric planer’s work.
Mac and Karen have a bedframe! That’s me in front. And I’m not sure if Brenda is faking sleep there - it was a full weekend!

Last spring I had to take down a black locust tree from my back yard. Much as it pained me to do so it has now given me three good projects: First, removing it made way for my workshop, second the large trunk will become frames for the sailing dinghy I’m building, and third, and to the point here, the locust provided the bending stock for the ribs in this new qajaq frame. These are a few shots of the splitting process that gave me the rough blanks for the ribs that I then band-sawed and planed to finished sizes:


I had two goals for this boat. I wanted a much flatter deck than my last qajaq, and I wanted to deal with the very stiff turning it exhibited. I did the first by dropping the masik even lower, and I think I’ve now reached a profile that’s more consistent with historical specimens. For the turning, I’ve added a fair bit of rocker as well as a little more volume in the bow, with the hope that when I lean it that that volume will come into play and shorten my waterline, something that didn’t happen in my last boat.


The boat is 18.25″ inches wide and 17′2″ long. The gunwales are spruce, the stringers red cedar, the ribs black locust. The keel stringer is random SPF I had on hand.


The spruce I had on hand wasn’t nearly long enough, at about 7′6″, but it was so clear and straight that it just wanted to be a set of gunwales. I ripped the plank into gunwale blank lengths I could resaw both gunwales from, and scarfed it with the traditional bird’s beak scarf, but instead of lashing I used epoxy to hold the scarfs firm. The gunwales bend perfectly fairly around the scarfs.