Steam Bending

Trees grow more or less straight. Sawyers mill trees into straight lumber. With a few tools, I can quickly put precise square edges on a board. But sometimes I want to make wooden shapes that are curved.

There are three main ways of creating curves out of wood: 1) cut the curve out of a solid piece of wood; 2) glue thin layers of wood together into a curved shape; or 3) soften the wood with heat and bend it.

Cutting a curve from a solid block produces a lot of waste for all but the gentlest curves. Curves cut from solid wood are also weak because they cut across the grain of a board. Bent lamination (method 2) produces stonger curves because the grain of each board being glued is left intact. However, the sawing required to create many thin boards for gluing wastes a significant amount of wood too.

Steam bending avoids these problems. The following pages illustrate the process of steam bending the parts required to make the oak coffee table.

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