"Falling asleep" - Map of gravitational field made from plywood. As a bed headboard for some reason.

I've seen some plywood sculptures before and loved the aesthetics. I always wondered why people don't take further advantage of the layering to create visuals like a topographic map (Spoiler: because it's a pain in the ass). I've needed a bed for a while anyway, and I thought a map would make for a cool headboard. And what's the coolest place of all to map? Outer space, obviously.

Specifically, I wanted to map some gravity wells/equipotential fields. The sun-earth-moon system above would be too difficult to do to scale, not to mention far beyond my physics knowledge to model. I settled on only the earth and the moon, admittedly also very much beyond my physics knowledge.

Warning: This is a bit of a lengthy album, but I've found the best way to learn is from mistakes. And I make a lot of mistakes. So you're welcome.

Before I started any woodworking I had to do some math. I needed to calculate the curve of the well (i.e. how gravitational force would change with distance) in order to know how deep to cut into the headboard. To accomplish this, I made what look like some pretty impressive calculations.

While they may look impressive, all the math above is wrong and I'm not actually smart enough to figure out the solution. So I just made a plot of a pretty curve in Excel and wrote down the line of best fit equation.

Empowered by this equation, I grabbed 4 sheets of cabinet grade plywood to make the headboard. Lowes/HD plywood had too many voids and delaminations, plus cabinet grade has more layers/inch thickness.

These sheets had to be glued into one 3" thick 300 lb behemoth. I didn't have a way to apply enough clamping pressure to laminate such a large area, so I decided to fasten them with screws.

I knew how deep the gravity wells will be at any given radius, so by subtracting that from the total thickness of the boards, I calculated the maximum depth I could sink the screws from the back at each radius without going through the board.

This . . . . did not work so great. But more on that later.

A buddy helped me spread the glue, align the sheets, and sink all the screws as quickly as possible. I rounded up all the bins in my house and filled them with water. In total this is 1,200 lbs of weight.
Titebond recommends using 100 pounds of clamping force per square inch. This is 3600 square inches, so it should need 360,000 pounds of pressure, or about 100 full-size sedans. I had 0.3% of that.

Let's hope the screws put the team on their shoulders.

After the glue dried we flipped this monstrosity over, and I started carving. I cut the wells using a router and my new toy, the Big Daddy Circle Jig 58X (patent pending). I used a 1/2" straight router bit, so for every ring the process was:

1. Plug the radius into an equation I used to get depth and set as max on plunge router.
2. Make big circles, increasing the depth 1/8" at a time until max achieved.
3. Move the pivot bolt 1/2" out along the jig and mount it back in the center of the "earth."
4.Unwind electrical cord that now has dozens of twists.
5. Repeat until I reached the max radius of 58"

Proving that:
1. It's so easy, I can cut circles one-handed.
2. I have no idea how to focus a camera.
3. I should probably be safer with my tools and stop showboating for imaginary internet points.

I gave the router a break every now and then to work on other parts. Here I am creating a planet from a scrap piece of maple, no big deal. God may have needed 7 days, but it took me just a couple hours with a bandsaw and a woodburning pen. Admittedly, I did burn in the Red Sea accidentally. It was a shameful moment.

Back to the headboard and making progress. The untouched rectangle will be the bottom of the headboard and hidden by the mattress and box spring. I wanted to leave myself plenty of material there as I hadn't yet decided how it would attach to the frame. Frankly that should tell you a lot about how this whole build is going to go.

At this point all of the routing is pretty much done.

I started taking the orbital sander to the face and it became obvious that this was not going to be as easy as I had hoped, but in fact would be as difficult as I had feared. But the good news is when I face a difficult problem, I buckle down and tackle it head on.

Nevermind, who wants to make the platform part instead?

To create the sides of the bedframe I needed about 340 4" x 6" rectangles and 40 more 6" x 9" rectangles. Obviously the apron played a critical role in this process.

My pipe clamps have a max of 60", so this was going to require several parts to end up with 89" sideboards and a 72" footboard (for a queen mattress). 60" was too much to do in a reasonable glue-up time anyway, so each component was made of two to three smaller sections. Even so, I should have used TB extend here to give myself some extra time during glue-ups.

Uh-oh. While my glue joints were top-notch, or at least middle-notch, the factory glue joints snapped with just a moderate amount of force. Stepping on it to get into bed would probably not go well. Could I just jump in and out of bed for the rest of my life and never make contact with the frame? Of course, and I seriously considered it. But in the end I decided to fix the issue.

The solution: Cut out the bottom, hide a secret beam underneath. Only people who read this build album will even realize there's a secret beam there, so it's likely the best kept secret in the world. This beam would also be made of plywood, but glued together and oriented longitudinally as a laminated veneer lumber beam. A laminated plywood beam would give me less flex along the length than dimensional lumber of the same size. Even more importantly, I had a lot of scrap plywood.

*I later decided not to incorporate the 2"x6"s shown here and replaced them with metal brackets.*

I later learned that in these beams, the strongest orientation is actually with the the face of the plies oriented perpendicular to the direction of force (so here the secret beam should have been rotated 90 degrees along its axis).

Oops. I think it should be OK

With that settled, it was time to tackle the corners. I didn't want to expose the face veneer of any of the plywood if I could help it, so I decided to make the corners radially symmetric.

Each corner was to be made of 20 wedges cut at 4.5 degree angles. I racked my brain for a week trying to figure out how to do this with the tools available, and the best of the worst options turned out to be a pretty simple jig. The 4" by 9" is just resting on a piece of scrap mounted so that it sits 4.5 degrees above the horizontal plane. Routing horizontally gave me my wedges.

Another shot of the wedge jig. The 4" x 9"s were actually 6" x 9"s, with the excess used to mount them to the jig and later trimmed off.

Warning: ugly clamp jobs ahead.

Assembling the wedges piecemeal. This is two wedges of five pieces, and there's no glue between the two.

Seriously if anyone has tips on how to do a better job with any of these glue-ups, please let me know. It's a major weakness for me.

After I had a semi-circle I cut two 6" by 6" squares out for the corners. Sorry I forgot to grab pictures.

The corners had to be routed out to hide the secret beam. You can see some burn marks from clearing out the straight sections which was . . . stressful.

Since I didn't have pipe clamps long enough for the whole beam, I glued on two pieces that were slightly longer, then glued and clamped these to each other and trimmed them down later to get the full length.

Some of you may have been worried about wood movement the moment you saw the bed. Plywood is very stable to humidity changes across the face, but expands through its thickness (e.g. like an accordion). So the sideboards and footboard may lengthen quite a bit, and fixing them to the secret beam could cause issues. But in all honesty, am I that worried about wood movement a year, or even ten years from now?

Yes. Yes, I am. But like the check engine light that's been on in my car for the past three months, I'm not going to do anything about it.

With the laminated beams in their place, I started on the joints from the footboard to the sideboards. I move homes a lot, and this needed to be deconstructable into easy-to-move pieces.

Fine, easiER-to-move pieces. They're still incredibly heavy These are 1" holes I drilled for the pins in the knockdown joints.

At this point some local wildlife appeared. I should submit to Nat Geo; this shot is amazing. Looks like some species of bird.

*Not pictured - Cutting the pins from an old closet rack pole and gluing them into the holes*

Moment of truth. It fits!

Instead of the 2"x6"s you saw diagrammed earlier, I used corner brackers to brace the undersides of the platform beams and mount to 2x10s on the inside. The brackets were just a tad too long to sit underneath the beams and needed a little haircut. Plus this album needed another shot of me in an apron.

The platform beams were secured to the 2" x 10"s with 4" screws, and underneath to the brackets. I've added some 2" x 6"s in joist hangers to support the future box spring.

With that done I needed to address the elephant in the room, or at least the piece of wood that weighed as much as an elephant - the headboard. I finished sanding the surface but wasn't happy with the results. The plywood isn't perfectly layered so cutting to depth in a exact circle doesn't necessarily mean that circle will stay in the same ply the whole way around. Even more importantly, the orbital sander also just wasn't a precise enough tool. These "bleeding" edges weren't what I had in mind. This is (inspired by) science, and I wanted precision, dammit. The rings would have to be fixed.

To mark new rings, I found the point on the perimeter of each ring with the largest radius. Then I marked a new radius with a pencil. Still the orbital sander just was too sloppy too hit these lines, and I never even considered hand sanding because that sounds miserable (foreshadowing).

Enter my new Dremel that my grandma had gotten me for last Christmas (THANK YOU GRANDMA!).

I'm sure there are sanding attachments for this but I knew it would be a helluva lot of sanding and therefore a helluva lot of $ for those attachments. So I took a metal cutting zip disc attachment, super-glued some rubber on, then cut adhesive sanding discs to size and replaced them as necessary. Easy and cheap.

THIS WAS SO DUMB. Generally I'm much more cavalier about sanding than cutting because worst case scenario I shave off a bit of my knuckle. With a metal cutting disc as the base, I'm lucky I didn't cut off my fingers. DON'T DO THIS.

Instead, give your grandma a call. She misses you and would love to hear from you.

As it turns out, the only weakness of a Dremel, a tool that both saws and produces dust, is sawdust. The sawdust kept blocking the vents of the motor and killing the Dremel, so I bought this little flex attachment. I put the Dremel under a garbage bag of shame to keep it clean and think about its actions.

Gotta pass the time somehow.

This was the most stressful part of the whole build and consequently I don't really want to talk about it.

Actually yeah let's just move on.

At this point I'm pretty sure I had amassed enough hours on the Dremel to apply for certification as a dentist. Starting to look cleaner though.

WARNING ENTERING SCIENCE ZONE where I anticipate questions that no one cares enough to ask.

Q: Are the earth and moon to scale?
A: The earth's diameter is around 4 times that of the moon. Here, it's 2.5 times bigger (5" : 2"). Could I have made it 4 times bigger? Yes. Why didn't I? Honestly I'm not sure.

Q: What about the distance between them?
A: The earth's diameter is approx. 8000 miles. The moon is an average of 240,000 miles away. If the earth is used to scale, the moon would be 12 feet away. Here, it's 4 feet.

Q: What about the gravity?
A: The force of gravity at the surface of the moon is 1/6 that of at the earth's surface. Here, the depth into the plywood is 1/6 around the moon as it is around the earth. I got one right!

Q: So the rate of change is correct between the two bodies?
A: No. I had to take some liberties with that. Gravitational force decreases inversely with distance. I brought this down from a power of 2 to 1.87, plus added a fudge factor to make the decrease seem a lot more gradual for aesthetic purposes. Sorry science, but sexy wins every time :( Also the area around the earth is a little jacked up because of problems during the build.

Q: Do the shapes of the gravity wells really look like that?
A: I'm going to say yes. Due to the centripetal acceleration of the system and the distortion created by the two gravitational fields, the equipotential lines turn into ellipses at the intersection. The earth's would probably be more distorted than shown.
If you think otherwise, please tell me. I certainly don't think this is completely accurate, and would love to see how it really compares. However, if you don't have the math or a good source back it up, I'm not interested. There are plenty of Lagrangian diagrams out there if you search, but I haven't seen any that are to scale. I am not a physicist, but if you are, enlighten me.

Q: Is that the real equipotential point between the earth and the moon?
A: Yup, the point where forces are equal and an object would be in an (unstable) equilibrium is about 85% of the way to the moon

Q: Speaking of Lagrangian points, would the earth-moon system have its own L4 and L5 points like the sun-earth system?
A: I thought they were only for three body systems, I don't know. For real, someone tell me. I But I sure as hell didn't carve them.

Q: Seriously why didn't you just make the earth and moon to scale to each other? It seems so easy.
A: Please leave the Science Zone immediately.

Let's talk about the holes you may have noticed. Remember the genius move to set the screw depths just shy of the thickness of the board at each radius? The not-so-genius move was to not measure the actual thickness of plywood. 3/4" plywood is actually 23/32", because the world is madness. With four boards, that error was magnified by 4, so most screws were a full 1/8" deeper than planned. That, coupled with the adjustment to the rings to eliminate the bleeding edges, meant I took too much off and the screw holes became visible

I thought about going full archaeologist: identify the color of wood of each layer with a screw hole, find the matching layer in a full thickness offcut, excavate until I reach that layer, and make matching wood filler from the dust. But I just used generic wood filler instead because to be honest this project was starting to break me.

I hadn't finished the front by a long shot but I needed a win to feel like I was progressing. I flipped the headboard over and drew some random curves to give it an organic shape. I freehand routed to cut out the curves.

I scribed along the edge at 1/4", 1/2", and 3/4" then used these lines to make shallower router passes and create the beginnings of a pleasant curve. Then I used my Dremel sander to smooth out the shape. If there's an ogee bit large enough to do this, I'm sure I can't afford it.

This times literally 100, then hand sanding to taste. Note that I'm still using the metal cutting disc despite recognizing the danger because I make poor life choices. Though let's be honest the only reason this gif is here anyway is because I wanted to show off how jacked my thumb muscles got from all the Dremeling.

At this point the project had taken almost six months of on and off work on nights and weekends. Like a build album 36 images deep but far from completion, that can take a toll on both your interest and your sanity. So I did what anyone would do and made a LEGO Interstellar themed movie trailer for a piece of furniture. A bit of a break for both you and I, dear reader https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UALXr9qxvgI

With the LEGO trailer having successfully restored both my sanity and virginity, it was time to get back to the grind. The Dremel did a nice job defining the rings, but it left the surface in a stepped and uneven pattern. I wanted it smooooooth. Not to mention the rough surface would look like trash once the finish went on.

Somewhere a while back I read a tip to use a raking light (i.e. shined obliquely to the surface) to highlight imperfections. I shut my garage door to keep out the daylight, turned off all the lights except a single lamp, and got to sanding. My neighbors probably saw the garage was no longer open all the time and assumed I had found something better to do with my time, but the joke's on them because . . . . I hadn't.

So over the next couple weeks I transformed into a Gollum with sandpaper: muttering to myself in the dark, driven to madness by an object that I both loved and loathed, and very likely for my journey to end with me clutching a severed finger.

Now that the the heavy sanding done, it was time for the finer work, prepping, and finishing. This may be the most important step, and it demanded great care, attention to detail, and could not be rushed.

But . . . I was moving again so none of that was really an option.

Absconding with the headboard in the middle of the night.

First layer of finish. I used a water soluble poly because I was afraid oil would turn it too amber-y. High gloss would have been cool but it would have just magnified any imperfections (of which there were many), so I went with a satin finish. Honestly I sped through this and the quality suffered for it.

Moving this thing by oneself is a bear of a task. If my landlord is reading this, sorry about the holes I put in the wall. And sorry you found out like this.

I added a French cleat on the back of this but forgot to grab a picture prior to hanging it.

Final assembly. Rather than hammer the joints together I used a couple clamps.

Yeah, there's gap. They spent a year in a humid garage, bite me.

I don’t regret this build. It was a great experience. I got much more comfortable with a Dremel. Above all I started and ended the project with ten fingers. But even with domestic birch plywood, there were too many issues with wood quality. Despite presumably all of the plies being birch (although the colors somehow span the rainbow, do not understand), they all tended to have different hardnesses and splintering tendencies. Carving through them made me confused, frustrated, and often, a little hungry. It would be fine with a more organic shape, but any design that demands precision will find plywood lacking.

At a certain point I had to decide when I was OK with the finished result. I could have spent another month making the rings perfect circles and patching up the splinters and chips and tire tracks (yeah look closely and there are bike tire tracks on some of the plies in the middle. What the fuck guys?) but I had to choose a point to stop. I’m sure there are some who feel like I should have done more, and you might be right. But every project, and every long-ass build album, must come to an end.

I wrote all this up to not only placate your insatiable need for OC but because I’d love criticism, suggestions, and advice on any part of the process. So have at it.

Oh and I would be remiss to not thank my roommates for letting me take over the garage and enduring the constant sound of machinery and the punctuating expletives that came from it. And thanks to my shopmate for helping me with the glue-up and biting his tongue through the whole project, despite wanting to tell me how terrible an idea this was.

Good morning, Earth.