Thread: Bending Wood / A Thought or 17

20mm over 55 - 60cm is not much. This will bend easily. Also white oak is a good choice for bending. Think of wine barrels! Check out youtube for steam bending wood - lots of information there.
Good luck!
BF

Originally Posted by rrich

I'm about to start a project of bending wood for the backs of chairs. The size of the back is to be 55 or 60 CM. The curve itself shouldn't be much deeper than 20 MM. The plan was to mill three pieces about 6.5 MM thick and steam bend those pieces.

After reading about the difficulties of Fletty's efforts in bending pallet wood, I'm rather wary. Perhaps I should start with 4 pieces of 4.75 MM thick?

Any advice or thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

Oh, the wood is American White Oak.

Be very selective when you pick each piece of wood that you're planning to bend. You need as near to dead straight grain as possible. If a piece has any grain run-out onto any of the faces, it will likely fail when bent, especially if the grain run-out is near the middle of the bend. There's an old article somewhere on the Popular Woodworking web site regarding some of the myths surrounding the bending of wood for furniture. I'm not at home at the moment, so I'm not able to search out the article for you - but you should be able to find it easily enough. I believe that I've also seen a few other steam bending articles on the Fine Woodworking web site as well.

One of the main myths that the Pop Wood article busted was that; "you can't bend kiln dried wood". They tested air dried versus kiln dried and found no difference, as long as the wood had acclimated in your workshop first. The article indicated that choosing wood with dead straight grain was far more important than whether the wood was air dried or kiln dried.

Regards,

RoyG

Originally Posted by rrich

After reading about the difficulties of Fletty's efforts in bending pallet wood, I'm rather wary. Perhaps I should start with 4 pieces of 4.75 MM thick?

Oh, the wood is American White Oak.

Hi Rich,
Please don't let my experience change your plans. It seems that American white oak is particularly good for steam bending, the bend you are aiming at is really quite mild AND it seems that my pallet timber had been thermally modified not just kiln dried.

If you have a look at this old thread.......

https://www.woodworkforums.com/showth...t=fletty+chair

...you will see some of the tricks required although Youtubes of steam bending American white oak suggest that it is without any of these vices?

Go for it Rich .... and take lots of pictures for us!

fletty

The plane of the wood cuts will make or break your efforts as I have said before.
Never assume for a minute that your wood was ever cut with steam bending in mind.
Study an example = you will see that the wood was cut face sawn/flat sawn, tangential to the log surface.
Anything else will be a problem = wood anatomy says so, not me.

My experiences with wood bending is that you will usually win some & lose some, so keep a couple of bits spare, just in case, though my bending has involved much much sharper bends than yours, so I would expect your success rate will be much higher than mine has been.

You'll need to experiment a bit to see how much spring back you'll get. From a shallow curve like you're talking about, it should be pretty small, but nevertheless, you'll most likely get some.
I've done some laminated bends, which is another option that has already been suggested, but most chair top rails I do can be comfortably sawn rather than bent, which saves a lot of hassle. By careful selection of your pieces, you can get nice, symmetrical grain patterns, too, so sawing has its pros. The cons are that it wastes more wood, and you may get significant grain run-out if your design calls for a thin rail with a deep curve.

Cheers,

WOW! Thanks mates!

More real information in 5 posts than in several books.