Gershwin Day Bed Completed
About three months after I started, I finally delivered the last of the seven pieces for the Gershwin Day Bed project, first described here. As a quick recap, this was inspired by an authentic 1920s piece owned by George Gershwin, but fine-tuned for the needs and aesthetic of my San Francisco client. And interestingly, in my searches over the months, I’ve stumbled on another recreation of the original piece.
Stats
13 sheets of walnut & mahogany veneered plywood cut into 119 pieces
32 square feet of walnut & lacewood veneer
40 board feet of solid walnut and solid wenge
4 redwood 2x8s
200 feet of aluminum rod & 18 feet of aluminum bar
18 feet of LED lighting
One quart of hide glue and a half gallon of wood glue
Total weight of the seven pieces: approx. 700#
Learnings
Three mistakes or almost-mistakes caused me a few extra hours of work, or at least thinking or design time, each:
Hallway size: Make sure there’s enough hallway space to rotate a piece out of the elevator, as well as into it. Fortunately, I adjusted the design due to this before I started construction, albeit after the design was almost finalized.
Double-check roundness & diameter: Verify that manufactured pre-bent quarter round plywood is indeed exactly the size it is supposed to be prior to gluing. Though it looked good with a quick fit-check, when I started gluing and screwing, there was a 1/4” gap due to imprecision with the radius.
Build on a perfectly flat surface: Though all the angles appeared to be perfectly square and all the measurements were individually correct, one of the pieces just wouldn’t fit! This stumped me for a while until I realized that the surface on which I was doing the assembly was not perfectly flat: an 1/8” variation in flatness over the 7’ of the surface caused a 1/2” alignment issue.
Drawing how I would rotate the piece out of the freight elevator into the hallway saved us from a lot of heartache on the final delivery.
This simplified drawing zeros in on the error in the quarter round plywood, which I worked around by trimming the longer side by about 1/4”.
The top image exaggerates the impact of attempting to build on a surface that is not flat; my problem was closer to the bottom image, where an almost-imperceptible 1/8” deviation in flatness caused a 1/2” issue in alignment at the top of the shelf dividers.
Progress Photos
For some progress photos along the way, check out this gallery.
Do you have any questions or thoughts about this piece, or have a similarly unique project you’d like to explore? If so, I’d love to hear from you!