Really, there's not a lot more to say about the bed. It was big, heavy, and used a lot of expensive and very nice teak. If it had been made from fir, I wouldn't be making a fuss about it; however, there were a couple of ingenuities in the construction necessitated by the required lack of visible fastenings. Basically the headboard, the footboard, as well as the side-rails to head and foot joints, were all held together with embedded half-inch threaded steel rod.
The rods were secured by embedded nuts at one end, and removable nuts and washers at the other. Perhaps easier to show than explain:
Here the head of the bed has been hung from the rafters, preparatory to turning over. The ends of the three bolts securing the unglued planks together can be seen on the base. The embedded nut in the top plank is of course invisible.
Embedded nuts were also put in the endboards:
A half inch nut has been driven into a blind seven-eighths hole at the bottom of a 1.25". The nut is then permanently trapped by epoxying a section of 1.25" oak dowel on top of it.
The shallow housings are ready to receive the stub tenons on the ends of the rails. and the inset drilled dowels are clearly visible, ready to receive their half inch bolts that fasten the side-rails:
To cut a long story short, here's the assembled bed frame:
After the bed was finished and delivered, I found that I had enough time to start (and finish) a small dining table. As with the bed, the design had to take into account the client's demand – in this case that as far as possible no under-framing should be visible, and this, along with the relative delicacy of the wood dimensions, made for an interesting design challenge.
In order to convince the client that the proposed solution would work, I took a crash course in using Google's SketchUp, a free perspective drawing application. In essence it's seemingly a simple program - create a block and carve bits out - but it gets very quickly more complex. I think you have to like puzzle solving to draw anything more than a cube with the odd square recess or protuberance.
However, after a couple of days work, I did manage a three-point perspective view of the proposed design; you can see a pdf here.
In real life, the actual base finished up looking like this:
The leg-rail joints are mortice and tenon, epoxy glued (probably overkill).
Getting out the 38" wide top was a considerable chore. Since it was made from a single 20" wide plank of Jatoba with one central glue join, I had to hand-plane the entire glued-up top down to size (seven-eighths)
In the end it was all worth it, and the client was pleased.:
(Our friend C., who owns a furniture gallery, maintains that custom-made furniture is mostly (her words) "a dog's breakfast", since the integrity of the artist's pure vision is inevitably corrupted by the ignorant and venal demands of the client. Myself, I like my customers to be happy, even if, like the wood we live with, they can sometimes be cross-grained, warped, and demanding to work with. But then difficult materials often produce the most interesting results....)