Repairing a Kid’s Bed

As part of my goals for 2019, I am going to try to write about some of my DIY and mak­er projects. So, here’s an unex­pect­ed one to start off the year…

The oth­er evening, I heard a thud and an “uh-oh” from my 11yo daugh­ter’s room. Turns out, when hop­ping on to the bed to read that night, the bed rail snapped. The bed rail was made from press­board, veneered to look like the rest of the fur­ni­ture (which I think is of slight­ly high­er qual­i­ty). Our daugh­ter felt ter­ri­ble about break­ing the bed, but in real­i­ty it’s a won­der it last­ed for the 7 years it did. An aver­age size tod­dler could break this stuff, let alone an aver­age size 11 yo girl. The press­board had cracked in two pieces, right through one of the screw holes for hold­ing the slats. 

We con­sid­ered pur­chas­ing a new IKEA bed or sim­i­lar, but she said she real­ly like this bed and would pre­fer if we could just fix it. Maybe that was part­ly her still feel­ing bad for hav­ing done it, despite my wife and I assur­ing her it was­n’t real­ly her fault at all. The only down­side to this was that I was going to have to pur­chase a full size sheet of ply­wood at the big box store to get the 6′-6″ rails out of them. I nor­mal­ly have the store cut the board along the short dimen­sion, so that it’s less than 7′ long as to fit into my Hon­da Pilot. How­ev­er, in hind­sight, I should have had them then rip down some strips to make it eas­i­er to man­age. A 6′-8″ by 4′ sheet of 3/4″ ply­wood is only slight­ly eas­i­er to man­age by your­self than a full size sheet.

I did get to try my hand at edge band­ing the ply­wood. Edge band­ing is a nar­row, thin strip of veneer (almost exact­ly like the sur­faces of hard­wood ply­wood) that has a heat-acti­vat­ed glue on the back­side. You sim­ply iron-on this to the edge of your cut ply­wood.1 It’s actu­al­ly a lot of nice fur­ni­ture and cab­i­netry is made and it’s a pret­ty amaz­ing trans­for­ma­tion. Of course, it’s also how a lot of cheap fur­ni­ture is made, too, but that’s often a plas­tic veneer rather than actu­al hard­wood. I could­n’t find maple veneer at my big box store, so I took a trip to my local Wood­craft shop. There, I also got a self-cen­ter­ing drill bit. I’d always con­sid­ered one of those to be for some­one who makes a lot of fur­ni­ture or cab­i­netry, but it’s worth it to buy some even for DIY’ers like me. It’s a huge time­saver for mount­ing hard­ware and real­ly makes the process more accurate.

So, I ripped down the near­ly full sheet of ply­wood on my lit­tle band saw. Again, I should have had the store cut this down, because it’s just not easy for one per­son to do this on even a high-end cab­i­netry saw, let alone a my small Ryobi2. It result­ed in some not-so-straight cuts, but they were good enough for this as I was­n’t joint­ing any­thing. I straight­ened out some of the bend met­al slat sup­ports in my machine vice and then got all the screw holes drilled out.

I did a small test piece with the edge band­ing and tried using one of those spring loaded edge band­ing trim­mers. The band­ing went on easy, but the trim­mer was not so great. It end­ed up tear­ing the band­ing in a lot of places. I still tried using it one the first rail, which was a mis­take. When try­ing to sand every­thing, the orbital sander grabbed one of those tears and ripped off a huge chunk of the band­ing. For­tu­nate­ly, I was able to cut out that piece by re-heat­ing the glue and Angela helped me put on a patch. It end­ed up look­ing just fine for our kid’s bed, but I learned my les­son. For the sec­ond rail, I sim­ply flipped the piece over and cut along the edge with a box-cut­ter blade. I then light­ly sand­ed over the cor­ner with a sand­ing block.

I used a sin­gle (though pret­ty heavy) coat of wipe-on polyurethane for the fin­ish. The final step was to stamp the work and then it was ready for assem­bly this after­noon. The final clip slid­ing in to place was so sat­is­fy­ing! The maple match­es the fur­ni­ture, but of course it will have to dark­en over time with expo­sure to light to ful­ly match. But, I’m pleased with the final result and I’m con­fi­dent this will last longer than the original.

1. If you want to know more about edge band­ing, Bob of ILTMS made an excel­lent “Bits” video on the sub­ject late last year. [↩]
2. It’s actu­al­ly my old­er broth­er’s table saw. He just need­ed a place to keep it and I need­ed one to use, so that worked out for us. [↩]