hardware, the Dread Pirate Roberts, boobytraps

I had high hopes for showing you my new sofa, except it was delivered with a large hole in the upholstery, so I did not accept delivery, and my new sofa will be arriving for the second time on Friday, hopefully without holes.

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I had big plans to go to Target and Lowes, but while at Target I was That Woman, the one who abandons a full cart and her purse in the middle of an aisle while her toddler makes a break for it and runs into the parking lot.  Lots of judgmental pointing but no one reaching out to STOP the toddler hellbent on freedom. Except Greg, thank goodness, he managed to stop her with a flying tackle. (But still, in the parking lot.) After that I was feeling frazzled and we came home and I laid on the sofa with a large lemonaide and some chocolate chips to soothe my nerves.

I needed to go to Lowes (which I did after the Mister came home and I went alone) in order to look for hardware for Greg's bed.  Greg broke his third bed in three years, two days before we moved, and so I have been hunting for vintage bed hardware since the day we got here.  Unfortunately I have come up empty-handed, despite much driving all over southern California to furniture repair places and vintage hardware stores.

This is the hardware that I am looking for, and no one who repairs vintage furniture  has ever seen anything like it:

Basically, the narrower side slots into a bracket contained within a hollowed out portion of the leg of the bedframe.

If you have ideas on where to find this hardware online, or if it has a special name beside bedrail fastener, I would greatly appreciate the help. I have tried ebay and every vintage hardware store known to man located in southern California and gotten nowhere.

I am willing to scrap this particular hardware and move on to a more modern/readily available means of fastening the headboard and footboard, but I cannot find a fastener that will fit over this hollowed portion:

I would like to use something like this, but everything modern I have found is too narrow or too short to fit over that hollowed out portion.  My last-ditch option is to drill holes straight through the front of the bed into the bedrails, but clearly that will ruin the aesthetics of the bed and I am trying hard to avoid ruining an 80 year old bed.

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Princess Pegleg stumped around the house wearing this tin cannister on her leg, shouting "I'm a piwate! I'm a piwate!" and then taking off her tin leg and bashing Peter with it.

As you wishhhhhhhhhh....

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Greg found a spool of string and created a boobytrap for unwary marauders and piwates, wherein you might be attacked by ninjas.  There was much jumping over and rolling under. They begged for baby powder so they could throw it on the string, as if to make invisible lasers show themselves, but I drew the line there.

I was unwittingly clotheslined by the first boobytrap, but I limped off to the sofa in the playroom to nurse my wounds, and that spool of string (which is still tangled over every conceivable surface in the living room) provided over an hour of entertainment to my children.  I may go buy another spool of string tomorrow.