Works in progress
For the first time, I'm doing (as one of the five projects I've got in progress right now) a piece of furniture where most of the wood is new. This bit of wood is the headboard of the bed I'm making to replace the icky futon sofa in Russell's room; aside from two planks and two sections of 2x2 that came off a couple of pallets from work, all the wood in this bed is new. My intent is to not have any metal fasteners in the completed headboard, but to have the thing be pegged together with wooden dowels, but I've had to drive some screws into the smaller diagonals to hold them in place until the glue dries and I can go back and drill the holes for the dowels (yes, this is not really the most efficient way of pegging a headboard together, but it's easier for me to prototype when I don't have to insert and remove dowels as part of the prototyping.)
Russell has some plans for this bed. He wants drawers under it, so he can keep his piles of junk close at hand. Originally he wanted shelves in the headboard, but at the very last minute (after I'd glued up the legs and the bottom crosspiece) he changed his mind and wanted "something else", but not shelves. Okeydokey. I'm glad I didn't spend a lot of time planning this bedframe.
Now he's asking for a nice tall footboard, so he can jump down to the bed from it; now, it's probably a good idea to have a good solid bedframe, because in all likelihood he'll be having sex on it within the next 10 years, but I'm not willing to let him break it in (or simply break it) by pretending to be Greg Louganis competing for one more Olympic metal; the bedframe is going to be made from 2x4 sticks of house framing (which are quite sturdy; I tested the strength of them by setting a stick up on the feet, then sitting on it, and it didn't noticably deflect) with palletwood slats going across them, but I still don't want him to do collision testing on it.
He wants it painted green, which is fine with me. Paint hides a multitude of sins. The second bed, on the other hand, now that one I won't paint.
Yes, it's a Pratt truss. But it's a decorative Pratt truss, which won't see any loads unless the bears start jumping from it.