Making Rustic Furniture: The Basics

I really enjoy making rustic furniture, and I want to see if I can pass some of that love for this along to you. Now, as woodworkers, most commonly when we think about woodworking, we're thinking about using plywood and dimensional lumber, making cabinets and furniture and tables, and you can make tables and chairs and all sorts of other projects with rustic furniture, but, you're not going to use plywood and dimensional lumber. It's one of the things I really like about this is, the materials are very natural. In this case, what I'm working on is a bed. This is the foot board for the bed.

The material I'm using here is peeled pine, real rustic looking. I love the look of this stuff when it's all done. Now, the other thing I really like about is the simplicity of this. Compared to some of the more complex woodworking I do, this is very easy to lay out, it's very, very forgiving. My wife is not real big on running a tape measure and measuring finitely to do cabinets and furniture, but she loves doing this kind of stuff because natural materials, very forgiving to work with.

So let me walk you through what's going on here and what I've got set up. Basically, it's all about mortise and tenon. We're going to do tenons on the ends of some of our material, mortises in the other parts. The mortise is very simple. All we're going to do is drill a hole.

Now, if in your shop already, you might have Forstner bits. This is a little bit different, this is what's called a self-feeding bit. When you're doing it handheld, like I'm about to show you, the self-feeding bit, makes this a little bit easier to do. This high-tech device on here, that's my depth of cut indicator, shows me when I'm done. So here in the vise, I've got a piece that's already started on.

It's ready to go. This is the horizontal component of the headboard. So I need to get my four holes in here. Like I've already done in the footboard pieces. I've got my layout lines.

I've got a couple of them already done. So mortise making is as simple as, get on that mark. And I'm just running that in until the edge of the tape is even with the material. Now we can back that out. That takes care of the mortise part of the project.

Now the tenon part, this is the part that's really cool because it uses such a cool tool to do this. It's kind of like the biggest pencil sharpener you ever saw. This big bell shape has in it, these cutters. Now what the cutters do is, as this spins, they're taken away material from the outside of the piece resulting in a perfectly sized tenon inside. The perfectly sized part comes from the fact that I can adjust these cutters.

So once you've drilled a hole, you can do some test tenons, and by controlling these positions, you can control the size the tenon until it's a perfect fit. So I make those adjustments, then we're ready to go. Now also on the side here, I've got control, that comes from these marks. This, as I look through the window shows me how long the resulting tenon is. So what we need to do is get the self-feeding bit out of the drill, get the appropriate tenon cutter in, we're doing inch and a half holes and inch and a half tenons on this project.

Now, I was talking about natural materials. So one way to do this kind of work is, just go out and harvest this stuff on your own. There are also companies that provide complete projects ready to go for this. So in this case, I'm actually working off of a plan, and I'm working off of a bed kit that I got in order to make this headboard and footboard. Now, when you're ready to do your tenon, what we're going to do is get this cutter up against the end grain of the material.

As I said, we're doing an inch and a half tenon here, with this cutter, if I come right onto that corner, it can be just a little bit difficult to get started. So a good way to cheat and make this a little bit easier, is to take a little bit of material off of there first. You can do that with a draw knife, you can do it with a band saw, but that just makes it easier for the material to engage inside that bell shape and get the tenon going. Now, when we do this, there's quite a bit of rotational torque on this. So a woodworking vice can do it for you but here's a great tip, a plumbers vice, which is designed to hold round stack works really, really well for grabbing this material.

Now I want to protect it. So I'm going to put this pad in here, and surround my work with that pad. Now, a couple of things as you're ready to run the tenon cutter, always make sure that the cutter is on your material before you turn the drill on. That's going to make it easier and safer to get started. And, we want to let the drill come to a stop on the work before we take it off.

So I'm ready to go here. I'm lining this up just visually with the end of my material, and it looks like we're ready to make a cut. Now with that tenon done, that is ready to go into our mortise. What a great fit between those parts, a little bit of glue added to that joint, it's really going to be strong. I want to get back to work here, get my bed done.

Hopefully I've done a good job of turning you on to making rustic furniture in your shop.