3/4 Maple Sacking Bottom Bed (ca. 1840) Part 2

Most of the photos below are of the bed that I have been working on completed. I also included several color and black and white photos of the bed taken with a RetroCamera App on my phone just for fun. Before getting into those, I also included a few photos of the slats that I made for the bed.

The bed had a unique problem in that the hardware that connected the rails to the head and foot board is a hook assembly. This is common enough, but usually, the hooks, which are connected to the rails, have two hooks per end. the reason for this is to keep the rails from swinging side to side. This bed had one hook per end, and so the rails moved around. The worst case scenario would be one of the rails slipping out from under the mattress and the mattress and the occupant falling to the floor in the middle of the night!

To rectify this, I kept the existing hardware, but made three special dovetailed slats that fit into the rails and prevent any movement. These slats lie underneath the other, more conventional slats. Here is a photo of the slats followed by a close up of one of the dovetails.

The rest of the photos below are of the completed bed. The first three were taken with a regular camera setting and the rest with the RetroCamera setting.