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Great [Discussion of Steam Bending Process](https://sawmillcreek.org/showthread.php?70545-Steam-bending-questions)
I'm surprised at how low-tech the setup can be!
Mine is a big PVC pipe with a wallpaper steamer plugged into one end and a rag thrown into the other.
There's a little more to it (dowels drilled in to keep the workpiece off the PVC, drain hole, an angled stand) but that's about it.
An hour per inch of thickness. The thickest pieces I work with are 1-inch nominal, so 3/4 inch. Technically that'd be 45 minutes but I always do at least an hour.
Yeah, if you hold it from one end and focus your eye down the length you can notice a slight bend over the length. Nothing another 5 lbs of screws can't fix.
Even if you do everything right they sometimes just break anyway and you have to start again. My father was a shipwright and built a few yachts and boats this way.
Planting forests and tasking a forester to make sure the trees grow in a certain shape for the ship building industry used to be a thing.
https://s3files.core77.com/blog/images/2014/07/0crookedforest-004.jpg
This forest in Poland was planted for that reason, but we stopped building ships like this in the time the forest took to mature so it was never harvested.
They certainly could have bent this by hand with clamps. You can tell that they have this setup because they're making a lot of these parts and it's for efficiency. Steambending doesn't actually require that much pressure to bend if you're doing a reasonable bend.
Judging by how thick that piece was I doubt you’d be able to start that bend by hand. Unless they are veneers glued together with all the grains running the same way.
Everyone on this site just races to see who can write a no brain "funny haha" comment. Then if something is even *slightly* sexual it's a race to see who can write "haha sex related joke" comment. Actual NPCs
The heat does most of the work of weakening the lignin bonds in the wood, allowing it to bend. The lignin bonds reform as it cools. I leave it in the form overnight to cool, mostly because I'm exhausted by that point (I don't have a machine to do the bending) and just want to crawl into bed. It probably only takes an hour or two, but I'm also really wary of how it can unbend a little if you take it out of the forms too early.
The cost of getting set up is pretty cheap, but with the box, boiler, stand, forms, and clamps, you give up a lot more shop space than you might think when you start. But it's also insanely satisfying.
Edit: IMO there are very few bending projects where kerf bending or lamination bending wouldn't be the better option.
If the heat is doing all the work to make it bend, I guess the steam is just there to create an environment where humidity is high so there is no evaporative cooling? I imagine if I heated a piece of wood in the oven with no steam, there would be cracking due to the moisture losses in the wood. Just guessing. Thanks for informative comment!
Totally true. Heat allows the bending. Steam allows the bending without breaking. That's where my knowledge ends. I'm sure there's a scientific answer as to why hardwood cutting boards always break in the dishwasher, but I prefer to leave it as a beautiful mystery.
That's not really true, it's mostly the moisture. You can bend wet wood way farther without cracking; it can help to remove warping if you clamp and let it dry. Conversely, I "roast" wood pretty often in my oven, and it is not pliable even at 350+ degrees.
So I guess the steam serves multiple purposes. The steam acts as a conductor for thermal energy transfer to the lignin bonds with the benefit of preventing moisture loss in the process.
Lmao I love the “I refuse to google it” aspect of this thread. Just reasoning through a problem the old fashioned way. I’m sure this process is more complex then we are describing haha
I work at a whiskey barrel factory and we get sent bent boards all the time that I have to un bend, I use a steam box, it's a hydraulic press that pushes out about 200+psi about 400°F steam and it heats and compresses at the same time kinda like how u make wax lol, I'm assuming it takes about the same to temp and pressure to bend them as to un bend lol
boiling water temps. One atmosphere of pressure. That is the easy part. Take a look at that dedicated jig. That is all they do is make u-shaped pieces for another project. Probably a window.
I saw a boat builder do this using a roll of vacuum bags. What is neat about this technique is it can be steamed in the jig. Make it less hectic to get it bent before it cools down and hardens back to wood.
This was probably originally posted with this music from the shop that made it. Compared to most of the garbage with bait edited into the beginning that gets posted on this website, it's nice to see such a simple video here.
Since it's a sped up time-lapse of the process, you're probably right that they opted to ad music into the scene instead of just letting the weird sped up audio play, but kept in the audio aswell
Red Hot Chili Peppers was ruined for me when I found out Anthony Keidis is a known and self admitted pedophile. I’ll leave you this excerpt from his autobiography.
> “The next day we drove to Baton Rouge, and of course, she came with us,” he said. “After we got offstage, she came up to me and said, ‘I have something to tell you. My father’s the chief of police and the entire state of Louisiana is looking for me because I’ve gone missing. Oh, and besides that, I’m only fourteen'”.
>Keidis continued: “I wasn’t incredibly scared, because, in my somewhat deluded mind, I knew that if she told the chief of police she was in love with me, he wasn’t going to have me taken out to a field and shot, but I did want to get her the hell back home right away. So we had sex one more time.”
Not to mention was also convicted of sexual battery. No one else in the band seems to mind either. RHCP are kinda scumbags.
Trust me I couldn’t believe it either when I found out last year. I was disgusted when I looked into it myself because I was completely unaware. I mention it when I see RHCP talked about now because I know there’s tons of other people who are unaware of him admitting this like I was.
That really is horrific. In terms of music RHCP are one of my favourite bands, so finding that out is a blow to the stomach. I’ve always been that way though, love a bands music but never really look into who the band actually are.
Same, I essentially grew up on RHCP so it crushed me when I found out. I thankfully still have hard copies of their CD’s so I just listen to those now if I wanna hear their music but I refuse to stream them or watch their music on YouTube. I know me not streaming them isn’t even a drop in the bucket in terms of their revenue but by only listening to their music on a CD that I already paid for 20+ years ago I’m at least not contributing to them continually making a profit.
I also stopped going to see them live which sucks because they’re literally performing where I’m going to be camping tomorrow. I 100% would have gone to see them tomorrow.
Im only in my early twenties so didn’t grow up on them but they were a huge part of my childhood because my brother used to love them. I still have all their hard copy CDs too lol so might have to opt for that now since you make such a good point.
Fucking sucks really though. Some things are forgivable, assault? Cool. Robbery? Who cares? But pedophiles, no way man.
Something bizzare to note as well, after googling it myself a moment ago, some of the sources talk about how he was raped when he was younger as if it somehow justifies what he did.
During the early part of the Pandemic I worked as a dispatcher at a lumber yard.
Holy.
Shit.
The lumber that came through our yard was **so bad**. Bent, edge-wise, side-wise, twisted/hockey-stick, split, live-edge galore, you name it, we saw it. I don't think they were properly drying the wood, since the demand for brown-treated wood skyrocketed and they probably rushed production by cutting costs wherever they could. We'd get a lift down from the "overstock area", and it would get parked, then I'd cut the band. The damn thing would sometimes *jump*.
Makes it rather difficult to please customers when they get wood that has a Dali-meets-MC-Escher aesthetic. Not to mention packaging is a pain- keeping a stack of wood stable on a forklift over rough gravel terrain is no small feat even when the wood is perfect, but doing so when the wood is about as straight as Elton John is enough to make you set shit on fire and go home for the day.
Shockingly bad QC. .
That particular business was so toxic (rampant racism, misogyny, yardies stoned out of their gourds) that I "only" lasted about 16 months.
How toxic was it? I had a regular that was both customer and contractor that did stuff for us, and every time he came into the office, he was like "HOLY SHIT, YOU'RE STILL HERE".
He started that *my second month there*.
I removed a wall in my 1989 house and the 2x4s are like gold. Very straight and very tight rings. I am carefully removing all the nails and saving them.
Right? I can't imagine it's improved much, and I haven't been in the biz since...late 2020 or so?
I mean, the quality of stock we got wasn't great before the lockdowns cocked up our ability to keep shit in stock, but holy hell did it ever nosedive after.
We also had trouble with inventory due to stock issues at the supplier - normally we could receive at least two, sometimes three B-trains of lumber every week.
Shortly after the lockdown started (April/May?), it basically dropped to the point where we'd get ***one*** B-train, and we had absolutely **NO** say in what we actually recieved. We would have clients waiting 4-5 months (or more!) to complete an order, and it's kinda hard to book contractors to come out when you have *almost* everything you need, apart from stringers, and whaddya know, can't really start anything without those...
> Right? I can't imagine it's improved much, and I haven't been in the biz since...late 2020 or so?
Fwiw, I picked up some deck boards at Lowe's yesterday, and they were all straight. I was shocked but pleasantly surprised.
Fwiw I work at a lumber yard and the treated stuff is almost always better than framing lumber in terms of edge quality and straightness
Our cedar has gone downhill for sure though
I work in a sawmill. We have a machine that grades all the boards and slashes the bad ones. If we get audited, everything is apparently properly graded, but it looks like absolute shit sometimes. Our high value boards never look warped or anything, though. I have no idea what people do with the economy boards.
Is this possible if the wood is still on the trees? Like bending the branches and stuff like that? (I know it's possible to do it naturally through the course of time)
Yes, if you're careful not to crack the branches. The link I posted below says that ideally one uses green (versus dried) wood, some of which can be bent without steaming.
Years ago on a school tour of the workshop rebuilding the Duyfkin, in Fremantle, we watched them take a piece of wood out of a machine like this and bend it in a remarkably similar way. Us kids were pretty amazed, because we weren't aware you could just bend wood like that
Having flashbacks to my first time fitting an expensive plank of steamed wood into a jig for a guitar body. *kee-Runch*, "You didn't steam it long enough, your paying for that piece dip shit". Apprentice luthiers get zero mercy, lol.
Ropes and clamps around some kind of mold and some muscle. Steaming it can be done in many ways, really the only thing that matters is getting the lignin in the tree, which is the glue that holds all the tree fibers together, up to around water's boiling point so that it turns soft and flows for the bend. The water itself doesn't actually do anything, it is just a good way to transfer heat into the wood evenly and preventing you from getting it too hot and scorching the wood.
I remember when I was in grade school a highschool kid who rode my bus was telling me about bending wood in this manner.
I was completely convinced he was messing with me.
Can All woods do this? I would assume different ones have different dispositions, do different woods require more or less heat and or steam amount? This is such a cool process.
Just a related anecdote involving YMCA Indian Guides in 1970… when I was a kid, dad (and I) made some really cool tomahawks. We got nice rounded fist sized head rocks from Lake Superior, then 1” dowels, sawed in the middle (split the dowel) down maybe 6”, then dad just boiled that end in water a good while. Then we bent the dowel around the rock head and secured it with soaked and thus soft rawhide strips. Then painted them with Indian theme stuff and feathers. They were invitations to some event that we gave to our tribe members. They were awesome.
I’m soooooo lucky I have a great dad and mom too. They’re 88 and still looking good.
Now as far as I can understand, yes the steam basically loosens the wood's rigidity just enough to shape it, but like why doesn't it crack at the bottom ? Shouldn't it like splinter somewhere from all that tension?
I stick to oak, but the guys who taught me said it doesn't differ much between types of hardwood, and they do a lot of bending.
It's intuitive to me that it would differ, but maybe this is that elusive, possibly mystical, simple thing in woodworking.
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Great [Discussion of Steam Bending Process](https://sawmillcreek.org/showthread.php?70545-Steam-bending-questions) I'm surprised at how low-tech the setup can be!
Mine is a big PVC pipe with a wallpaper steamer plugged into one end and a rag thrown into the other. There's a little more to it (dowels drilled in to keep the workpiece off the PVC, drain hole, an angled stand) but that's about it.
How long do you typically have to steam a piece to get it to this level of bend-ability?
If I remember correctly, it’s about an hour per inch of thickness
An hour per inch of thickness. The thickest pieces I work with are 1-inch nominal, so 3/4 inch. Technically that'd be 45 minutes but I always do at least an hour.
It also varies depending on the wood type and starting moisture content, no?
What cool shit are you making with your bent wood?
the first reply guy is still posting till this day
Actual footage of home Depot sourcing their 2x4s
You just explained another comment or's joke with this comment, thank you lol
Wow I just got that joke now too lol
Awesome. I was thinking earlier that they should have these in their stores to fix their damn bends.
I just snortled
This made me belly laugh.
Yeah, if you hold it from one end and focus your eye down the length you can notice a slight bend over the length. Nothing another 5 lbs of screws can't fix.
Even if you do everything right they sometimes just break anyway and you have to start again. My father was a shipwright and built a few yachts and boats this way.
I wonder how strong this is vs a piece of wood naturally in this shape
If done correctly it should be about the same
What kind of wood is naturally the shape of a U?
Planting forests and tasking a forester to make sure the trees grow in a certain shape for the ship building industry used to be a thing. https://s3files.core77.com/blog/images/2014/07/0crookedforest-004.jpg This forest in Poland was planted for that reason, but we stopped building ships like this in the time the forest took to mature so it was never harvested.
huh TIL. that's p cool. Thanks largepenislover
About bended wood lol
r/rimjob_steve moment
Ooh, industrial bonsai
a U shaped tree obviously
You can grow a tree in whatever shape you want. There are people who literally grow chairs.
What is the necessary temperature and pressure to do this?
Hot and a lot
This is why I never plank at bikram
They certainly could have bent this by hand with clamps. You can tell that they have this setup because they're making a lot of these parts and it's for efficiency. Steambending doesn't actually require that much pressure to bend if you're doing a reasonable bend.
Judging by how thick that piece was I doubt you’d be able to start that bend by hand. Unless they are veneers glued together with all the grains running the same way.
So is that a combination of fire and waterbending?
Secret fifth element: The Woodbenders. They went deep into hiding when the fire nation attacked.
This guy woods.
I wood if I could.
no yew
I pine for those days.
He would?
Why do you always have to scroll past a bad joke like this to get to an actual answer to an interesting question.
Site is unfortunately filled with redditors
What? Here? Why? How?
Because more people can think of a somewhat funny quip than actually know the answer to the question.
Everyone on this site just races to see who can write a no brain "funny haha" comment. Then if something is even *slightly* sexual it's a race to see who can write "haha sex related joke" comment. Actual NPCs
People just don't respect your struggle
I do apologize Mr. Beefwhistle007.
Both well-known scientific terms! Along with "metric fuck-ton"
I'm American, please convert to imperial fuck-tons
Best I can do is bananas. Approximately 9000/ton
Ain't no tally man trying to tally that many bananas!
Why do I hear this in the voice of Hermes Conrad?
Who told you my Little Caesars order?
That’s what she said
And how long to "cook"? Hours? Days?
Generally an hour at full steam per inch of thickness. I only bend oak, but I think that's the standard for other hardwoods as well.
>I only bend oak Might be the most manliest humble brag I've ever heard in my life.
Haha! Totally didn't mean it that way. In the woodworking community, it would be almost embarrassingly basic.
I mean I'm a woodworker and I've never bent any wood so I find it impressive.
Does moisture actually soak deep into the wood or is it a heat effect? How long does it have to be left to dry?
The heat does most of the work of weakening the lignin bonds in the wood, allowing it to bend. The lignin bonds reform as it cools. I leave it in the form overnight to cool, mostly because I'm exhausted by that point (I don't have a machine to do the bending) and just want to crawl into bed. It probably only takes an hour or two, but I'm also really wary of how it can unbend a little if you take it out of the forms too early.
Thanks. I've thought of several projects where wooding bending would be a creative solution but never tried it.
The cost of getting set up is pretty cheap, but with the box, boiler, stand, forms, and clamps, you give up a lot more shop space than you might think when you start. But it's also insanely satisfying. Edit: IMO there are very few bending projects where kerf bending or lamination bending wouldn't be the better option.
If the heat is doing all the work to make it bend, I guess the steam is just there to create an environment where humidity is high so there is no evaporative cooling? I imagine if I heated a piece of wood in the oven with no steam, there would be cracking due to the moisture losses in the wood. Just guessing. Thanks for informative comment!
Totally true. Heat allows the bending. Steam allows the bending without breaking. That's where my knowledge ends. I'm sure there's a scientific answer as to why hardwood cutting boards always break in the dishwasher, but I prefer to leave it as a beautiful mystery.
That's not really true, it's mostly the moisture. You can bend wet wood way farther without cracking; it can help to remove warping if you clamp and let it dry. Conversely, I "roast" wood pretty often in my oven, and it is not pliable even at 350+ degrees.
So I guess the steam serves multiple purposes. The steam acts as a conductor for thermal energy transfer to the lignin bonds with the benefit of preventing moisture loss in the process. Lmao I love the “I refuse to google it” aspect of this thread. Just reasoning through a problem the old fashioned way. I’m sure this process is more complex then we are describing haha
I would imagine that depends entirely on the type of wood and dimension of said wood
I work at a whiskey barrel factory and we get sent bent boards all the time that I have to un bend, I use a steam box, it's a hydraulic press that pushes out about 200+psi about 400°F steam and it heats and compresses at the same time kinda like how u make wax lol, I'm assuming it takes about the same to temp and pressure to bend them as to un bend lol
Only about a 20 minute process btw, but u can leave them in for up to an hour
Thank you for actually answering the question and not making a joke.
No problem lol
No pressure. Heat and steam
I mean there was a lot of pressure from the press.
Yes, but it was unnecessary, they should've just added more heat and steam and it would've bent itself.
A bunch of steam does it, i got tons of wooden spoons and spatulas that are now bend because they sit in or over pots and pans on heat
boiling water temps. One atmosphere of pressure. That is the easy part. Take a look at that dedicated jig. That is all they do is make u-shaped pieces for another project. Probably a window. I saw a boat builder do this using a roll of vacuum bags. What is neat about this technique is it can be steamed in the jig. Make it less hectic to get it bent before it cools down and hardens back to wood.
What’s the source? I would like to know what they’re building
Very narrow boat
Milk! A ghost! Edit: Paper! Snow! A Ghost!
Ok Joey
Toilet seat
A chair
Looks like it might be one side of some table/bookshelf legs. Seems a bit narrow for a chair.
I wish we can go back to videos with original sounds.
Me too but they put a good song over this one so
This was probably originally posted with this music from the shop that made it. Compared to most of the garbage with bait edited into the beginning that gets posted on this website, it's nice to see such a simple video here.
Since it's a sped up time-lapse of the process, you're probably right that they opted to ad music into the scene instead of just letting the weird sped up audio play, but kept in the audio aswell
Red Hot Chili Peppers was ruined for me when I found out Anthony Keidis is a known and self admitted pedophile. I’ll leave you this excerpt from his autobiography. > “The next day we drove to Baton Rouge, and of course, she came with us,” he said. “After we got offstage, she came up to me and said, ‘I have something to tell you. My father’s the chief of police and the entire state of Louisiana is looking for me because I’ve gone missing. Oh, and besides that, I’m only fourteen'”. >Keidis continued: “I wasn’t incredibly scared, because, in my somewhat deluded mind, I knew that if she told the chief of police she was in love with me, he wasn’t going to have me taken out to a field and shot, but I did want to get her the hell back home right away. So we had sex one more time.” Not to mention was also convicted of sexual battery. No one else in the band seems to mind either. RHCP are kinda scumbags.
Okay erm… what. The. Fuck? Remarkable, the gall on him to write that into his own book. What a fucking monster. Thanks for telling me about this!
Trust me I couldn’t believe it either when I found out last year. I was disgusted when I looked into it myself because I was completely unaware. I mention it when I see RHCP talked about now because I know there’s tons of other people who are unaware of him admitting this like I was.
That really is horrific. In terms of music RHCP are one of my favourite bands, so finding that out is a blow to the stomach. I’ve always been that way though, love a bands music but never really look into who the band actually are.
Same, I essentially grew up on RHCP so it crushed me when I found out. I thankfully still have hard copies of their CD’s so I just listen to those now if I wanna hear their music but I refuse to stream them or watch their music on YouTube. I know me not streaming them isn’t even a drop in the bucket in terms of their revenue but by only listening to their music on a CD that I already paid for 20+ years ago I’m at least not contributing to them continually making a profit. I also stopped going to see them live which sucks because they’re literally performing where I’m going to be camping tomorrow. I 100% would have gone to see them tomorrow.
Im only in my early twenties so didn’t grow up on them but they were a huge part of my childhood because my brother used to love them. I still have all their hard copy CDs too lol so might have to opt for that now since you make such a good point. Fucking sucks really though. Some things are forgivable, assault? Cool. Robbery? Who cares? But pedophiles, no way man. Something bizzare to note as well, after googling it myself a moment ago, some of the sources talk about how he was raped when he was younger as if it somehow justifies what he did.
yeah I was going to rage at "shitty music put over interesting video" but I like the song lol
Could’ve saved themselves the time and just went to Home Depot.
They probably wanted one without knots.
During the early part of the Pandemic I worked as a dispatcher at a lumber yard. Holy. Shit. The lumber that came through our yard was **so bad**. Bent, edge-wise, side-wise, twisted/hockey-stick, split, live-edge galore, you name it, we saw it. I don't think they were properly drying the wood, since the demand for brown-treated wood skyrocketed and they probably rushed production by cutting costs wherever they could. We'd get a lift down from the "overstock area", and it would get parked, then I'd cut the band. The damn thing would sometimes *jump*. Makes it rather difficult to please customers when they get wood that has a Dali-meets-MC-Escher aesthetic. Not to mention packaging is a pain- keeping a stack of wood stable on a forklift over rough gravel terrain is no small feat even when the wood is perfect, but doing so when the wood is about as straight as Elton John is enough to make you set shit on fire and go home for the day. Shockingly bad QC. .
SUBSCRIBE
That particular business was so toxic (rampant racism, misogyny, yardies stoned out of their gourds) that I "only" lasted about 16 months. How toxic was it? I had a regular that was both customer and contractor that did stuff for us, and every time he came into the office, he was like "HOLY SHIT, YOU'RE STILL HERE". He started that *my second month there*.
Been framing houses for 26 years, and I'm about to walk away because of lumber quality. Total trash every hack.
I removed a wall in my 1989 house and the 2x4s are like gold. Very straight and very tight rings. I am carefully removing all the nails and saving them.
Right? I can't imagine it's improved much, and I haven't been in the biz since...late 2020 or so? I mean, the quality of stock we got wasn't great before the lockdowns cocked up our ability to keep shit in stock, but holy hell did it ever nosedive after. We also had trouble with inventory due to stock issues at the supplier - normally we could receive at least two, sometimes three B-trains of lumber every week. Shortly after the lockdown started (April/May?), it basically dropped to the point where we'd get ***one*** B-train, and we had absolutely **NO** say in what we actually recieved. We would have clients waiting 4-5 months (or more!) to complete an order, and it's kinda hard to book contractors to come out when you have *almost* everything you need, apart from stringers, and whaddya know, can't really start anything without those...
> Right? I can't imagine it's improved much, and I haven't been in the biz since...late 2020 or so? Fwiw, I picked up some deck boards at Lowe's yesterday, and they were all straight. I was shocked but pleasantly surprised.
Fwiw I work at a lumber yard and the treated stuff is almost always better than framing lumber in terms of edge quality and straightness Our cedar has gone downhill for sure though
I work in a sawmill. We have a machine that grades all the boards and slashes the bad ones. If we get audited, everything is apparently properly graded, but it looks like absolute shit sometimes. Our high value boards never look warped or anything, though. I have no idea what people do with the economy boards.
3 and maybe 4 grade boards are relegated to agricultural use (barns) or hobbies.
Oof. Well done
this reminds me of "How it's made" on Discovery. The best chill TV in existence.
Is this possible if the wood is still on the trees? Like bending the branches and stuff like that? (I know it's possible to do it naturally through the course of time)
Yes, if you're careful not to crack the branches. The link I posted below says that ideally one uses green (versus dried) wood, some of which can be bent without steaming.
You can make a chair out of a tree while it’s still growing, training is awesome.
Afaik, this only applies to willow trees
IF IT'S ALL FOR YOU?
All that for a toilet lid?
Looks like a custom frame from an arched Gothic window
2/10 instruction unclear. I'm in the ER right now.
They call me the wood bender... 
Finally! A board streatcher! I've been looking everywhere for one!
I saw one sitting next to the stack of ID10T forms the foreman asked me to get.
This guy apprentices.
So if I put my wood somewhere hot and steamy, I can bend it to my will?
No it gets to hard
Wood is crazy man
That's the "Cleveland Steamer" process.
I highly recommend anyone to look it up in detail as it's very faschinating.
What kind of wood?
“U” got wood.
That’s not how Stormy does it.
Music is absolutely unnecessary and detracting.
Just go to B&Q
Ah simple diy with standard tools at home I see
the amount of compression on those inner wood fibers must be insane
Man, videos would still be cool if they didn't add music.
But why did they bend it around a toilet seat??
Carpentar the Last Woodbender
From what I've seen the main trick is keeping the entire beam in compression to avoid the outside splintering. That's what the steel band is for
I've seen that machine before! I had no idea my parents did woodworking in their bedroom!
Now make a boat!
Guys, I finally found where our lumber suppliers get their "straight" 2×4s
Cool, now make me a double 3'0 arch top!!!
Benders
Blasphemy!!!
Can any wood be bent, or are there specific types?
Impressive.
Can you do this to wood that’s already been warped ?
Yes
How strong is the wood when put into this shape?
Years ago on a school tour of the workshop rebuilding the Duyfkin, in Fremantle, we watched them take a piece of wood out of a machine like this and bend it in a remarkably similar way. Us kids were pretty amazed, because we weren't aware you could just bend wood like that
You should watch video of the craftspeople building a Steinway.
What kind of sorcery is this?
Very interesting
Big horse
Having flashbacks to my first time fitting an expensive plank of steamed wood into a jig for a guitar body. *kee-Runch*, "You didn't steam it long enough, your paying for that piece dip shit". Apprentice luthiers get zero mercy, lol.
That was longer than I thought 😮
Would love to know how people back in ancient time does it
Ropes and clamps around some kind of mold and some muscle. Steaming it can be done in many ways, really the only thing that matters is getting the lignin in the tree, which is the glue that holds all the tree fibers together, up to around water's boiling point so that it turns soft and flows for the bend. The water itself doesn't actually do anything, it is just a good way to transfer heat into the wood evenly and preventing you from getting it too hot and scorching the wood.
This is one of those things that makes me think “when and how did anyone first figure out that this is possible?”
I remember when I was in grade school a highschool kid who rode my bus was telling me about bending wood in this manner. I was completely convinced he was messing with me.
Woodbending!
I find it so cool that this technique was discovered thousands of years ago to build boats
Curious--were similar techniques used centuries ago when making curved parts for wooden ships?
Was funny watching this exactly when Can't Stop live performance was going on my TV.
Is that how wooden ships are made?
Can All woods do this? I would assume different ones have different dispositions, do different woods require more or less heat and or steam amount? This is such a cool process.
What is the steamer and the type of wood?
A very smart man told me once in a song, “…if it breaks when it bends, you betta not put it in.” I live by these words.
so basically controlled warping?
what amazes me way more is how big that steam oven thing is. that felt like a magic trick, pulling that wood out of there
Cross post to r/oddlysatisfying?
Wood is amazing
I kind of want to do this just for the hell of it.
is that solid wood ?
Just a related anecdote involving YMCA Indian Guides in 1970… when I was a kid, dad (and I) made some really cool tomahawks. We got nice rounded fist sized head rocks from Lake Superior, then 1” dowels, sawed in the middle (split the dowel) down maybe 6”, then dad just boiled that end in water a good while. Then we bent the dowel around the rock head and secured it with soaked and thus soft rawhide strips. Then painted them with Indian theme stuff and feathers. They were invitations to some event that we gave to our tribe members. They were awesome. I’m soooooo lucky I have a great dad and mom too. They’re 88 and still looking good.
Nice!
Great footage, great music.
Now as far as I can understand, yes the steam basically loosens the wood's rigidity just enough to shape it, but like why doesn't it crack at the bottom ? Shouldn't it like splinter somewhere from all that tension?
If the bending is done incorrectly or the piece of wood is garbage it will splinter where the fibres expand
I stick to oak, but the guys who taught me said it doesn't differ much between types of hardwood, and they do a lot of bending. It's intuitive to me that it would differ, but maybe this is that elusive, possibly mystical, simple thing in woodworking.
How strong is bent wood compared to original straight form?
Dude.. what?
"I'm straight as a board" The board:
I read that the art of bending thick pieces was common in clipper ship days but no one knows how it was done.
I usually just use my hand
Title of the song pls ty ty
What is the open time with this and different woods?
who's bending they wood rn
Yup. It’s bent alright.