Sunday 16 December 2007

Steam bending



I like heating wood with steam and bending it into nice curves - don,t do it often enough. The steaming rig is a piece of downpipe with a batten taped to it to stop it going too floppy when it gets hot. There's a removable wooden bung with a little hole in it and a bung in the other end drilled to take the pipe from a wallpaper stipper which gives 1.5 hours of steam - just enough for a 1.5" diameter piece of wood.
The bending jig is a la Mike Abbott and I didn't put the fulcrum quite near enough the end. That makes it quite hard to bend relatively short lengths of wood. Still - you live and learn ....

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