How to bend wood

[Armand Tatro]

I need to rebuild the front porch on my house and it has a curve in it.  How do you make wood go around a curve?  Any books or videoes on this topic?   Armand

[Ianab]

Got any pictures of what you are trying to replicate?

Bending wood usually involves steam. The wood is placed in a steam tube and left to soak in the hot steam. This softens the wood, lets you bend it in a form of some sort. When the wood cools and dries it retains the new shape.  Something like this can be build from a piece of large plastic pipe and a large kettle to supply steam.

For something large you will probably need to laminate up series of boards to get a single heavy piece.

Other methods would be scribing it out of a larger board or building it up from straight laminations and then cutting away the curve.

Or building it up as a hollow form using plywood?

What would work best depends on exactly what you want to achieve, and what  you have to work with.

Ian

[Lud]

I've steamed.  I've laminated around forms.   One should also mention Kerfs!   Repeated shallow cuts can ease compression on the inside of a curve.

But you're right.  He's got to tell us what he's trying to do before we can tell him how to do it.  We're not wives! ;D

[wheelinguy]

I would suspect that if you are trying to rebuild a porch that the steam box and amount of steam you would need would be prohibitively large.  Laminating or making kerfs seems to be the way to go but like the others said we need more input.  Sizes length, width, depth radius?  We did a wave shape on house once, but that was using pvc trim board and lots of heat!  Lud, that wife comment is hilarious. :D :D :D

[submarinesailor]

At my last timber framers event.  We used this:

  


to bend this.


It is 3"x5" white oak

Bruce