- [Narrator] The Wood Whisperer
is sponsored by Powermatic and Titebond. - Have you ever tried to bend a board? It doesn't usually go very well. But in wood working we have
a couple different ways that we can make this happen. One is bent lamination and
I've actually done a video on this in the past. It's where you take a board,
you slice it into thin veneers, put glue between each layer and then you bend it against a form and then when the glue dries,
it takes the new shape. The other method is steam
bending, that is something that I've never done before, so I
needed to make little skis, or runners for a small sled for the kids, and I thought this would
be a good opportunity to play with steam bending. So I'm going to get into
this for the first time. I'm going to take you guys
on the journey with me, and in some cases I'm going
to sort of just ignore advice on purpose because I want
to see what the limits of this process are. I want to see why things break, and work my way toward a successful bend. Now even before I start
thinking about the steam box and steam generation I'm
actually thinking about the material that I'm using. Steam bending works better
with air dried lumber and I don't have any air dried lumber. All I have is kiln dried. So this is some white oak
which is a good bending species it just happens to be kiln dried. So from what I've read you need to kinda pre-treat this
stuff a little bit. Soften it up a little bit. So that's gonna be step one
we'll re-saw to the thickness that we'll use in the project and then we'll make a fancy little bath. (saw humming) Now the bath for these
boards doesn't have to be anything fancy, but if
you want to be efficient about it and you don't
want to use your bath tub in the house or a big tote
which could be wasteful. You might consider something
like this four inch PVC. If we put an end cap on
one end we could have a very long bath tube that
we could fill with our water and allow these guys to sit
for as long as we want to. You don't have any evaporation,
you can cap off the top if you want to, so that's
what we're going to do. I'm going to start with the Sawzall, and just cut along this line. (saw humming) Now I've got my end cap
here but I'm gonna flip this guy around and use the factory edge instead of my jacked up edge that I made. Pop this guy on there
and I don't think I need any cement these things fit pretty nicely, I don't think it's gonna
leak, what do you think? I find your lack of faith disturbing! Now instead of just adding
water I'm actually gonna put some fabric softener into the water, which will hopefully
help soften the fibers. Now I read about this on
two different websites, which by internet standards that means it's indisputable fact. So we're going to add it at
about half a cup per gallon which I'm pretty sure they just made up. So you know a good cap
full for two gallons and we'll start adding it to the tube. I don't know if this is going to work, but at least the shop smells snuggly soft. And now I'm just going to
drop all four pieces in, and by the way I have two
thicker pieces at about half an inch and two at a quarter inch. I'm not 100% sure what I'm going to use in the project yet but
figured it would be nice to have both thicknesses to dest with. Okay so we got a floater in there, of course the wood is going
to float so we need something to weigh it down, I guess
I don't see anything wrong with using a fire
extinguisher, it's got a fit, it's heavy and it's even
got a hook on it to stop it from going too deep, but,
well the wood is submerged. So how long do we let it sit? I don't know, I'm going
to let it sit overnight and then I'll do a test
tomorrow for my first run. If I get a bad result then
I have three other pieces in here to continue this process with, so we'll see how it goes. Now while those boards
soak we can make the little steam chamber thing, so we
took some outdoor plywood. Cut it into roughly six inch strips. They're about four feet long
and we have two end pieces which will make the back and the door, and I'm gonna pre-drill
here because I wanna have some dowels located along the length. These dowels will allow us to put the work high up in the chamber
so it gets the advantage of the heat rising and the steam rising and we'll just span from side to side with these little dowels. So I've gotta drill a few more holes here, make sure they're spaced the
same on both side pieces. (drill whirring) At the back of the box we need to drill a half inch hole for
this little brass filling that came with the kit,
that's where the steam is going to enter the box. (drill whirring) Oh maybe I need a larger bit, it's a little snug, it's all
right we'll make it work. (drill whirring) Very nice. I got the two sides in place,
I'm gonna bring the top in drop it on top, really nothing fancy here. Just screws and no glue, the idea being we could
take this apart for storage or to modify it in the future. It's first time doing
this so I don't know. I'll probably have to make
changes at some point, just a countersink,
start driving the screws, (drill whirring) and before I screw down
the second side piece, we will cut some of the dowel
stock obviously they're gonna be harder to install if we
screw that together now. (saw screeching) (hammer thudding) (drill whirring) (wood thunking) (drill whirring) So next thing I need to
do is attach this piece of the back with the brass fitting in it. This is where the steam's gonna come in, so the idea being the
steam comes in one side, travels through and kinda stays up and we're gonna tilt the
box slightly this way. So the steam rises up,
condensation goes down and that angle will allow the condensation to go this way and that
means we need some kind of a drain hole here at the bottom. (drill whirring) Now as the steam travels
through this thing, it needs a place to go
so we will have a front hinged door but that door
is closed all the time. So in order for the steam to
escape we're going to wind up putting a little hole,
and it's pretty nice that this kit came with all this hardware. I'm not sure if they
still sell it like that. But at least five years ago they did. (drill whirring) All right before I actually attach these to the side I almost
forgot instructions say to put a little bit of a
gasket, or weather seal, oh look at that it just shows up, and this way you've got a little bit of an additional seal around the outside. You know me, any excuse to
whip out the knife, scissors. Still not sponsored by Kershaw Blades. (drill whirring) a little hole for a meat thermometer. (drill whirring) Boop, got two little
support pieces that will be like risers here I'm gonna make this side, the side with the door be a little higher, and then this side, the
side with the drain hole and where the steam
comes in, be like a dis. I think we could use this
to maybe proof bagels that's how they do it right? A big steam chamber. So we've got soaking boards,
we've got a steam chamber ready to go, what we don't
have is a bending form. I'll make the form out
of some MDF sheet goods. The first piece establishes
the desired shape. I'm actually making runners
for a kid's pull sled which is our next project video, so make sure you click
that subscribe button and the bell so you don't miss out. The curve is finessed and smoothed. I take the finished piece and
use it to make another copy. I need to build up at least three layers to have the thickness that I
need for the project parts. With the pieces glued
and screwed together, I can flush trim the new
piece to match up perfectly. Now for the third piece. (drill whirring) (sander hissing) So now we're ready to run our first test. We've got the steam chamber
set up, the block on the side with the door is just a little bit higher, so that we have a bit
of an angle this way, our drain holes are down
here, I've hooked up this hose filled up the little steam generator and plugged it in and now we wait. All right so it's been about 15 minutes and we have a nice rolling boil here, and steam should start traveling
through into the chamber. See the dial moving up? We've just passed the rare beef and smoked ham on our way to poultry. So now I'm gonna grab one
of these wonderful smelling pieces of wood, also heard
from a lot of people that on wood this thin the
fabric softener is overkill but it smells great. Now I really don't know
if this is gonna blast me with steam so just in
case I have gloves on. Gluglugluglug, pop this guy in there. Close it up. Steam it baby. Now generally speaking
they say about an hour per inch of thickness and
we've got a half inch piece. So we're looking at a half hour. It's a good idea to not
shove your hand in there, don't ask me how I know. All right ready here I come Jay. - [Jay] I'm right here. - All right, start with a clamp here, try to go in the middle of the work piece, and one of us will clamp
the other's gonna push. Re tighten 'em as we need. Okay just put it on
there as a place holder we'll move to the next one. Well that wasn't too bad at all, and I think it'll get even better results when I have a narrower
piece where it's not higher than the form itself. But not too bad at all in the end, at a half inch thick given
that much extra soak time plus the fabric softener I think you know I wasn't really expecting
too much of a problem. So I might leave this overnight, but I'm gonna start thinking
about my actual ski pieces for the sled, they'll be a full you know 48 inches in length. So when you're picking
the material for this sort of bending operation if
you have a slight curve and the pieces are fairly thin
you can be a bit less worried about grain direction, but
if you're doing something that's a much more intense bend, and get some nice
straight grained material. So I still have a pretty
straight board here. I'm gonna take this guy
down to about a half inch and then it'll be ready
for the bending operation. But thankfully with this
thickness with this bend I just don't think we
need to worry too much about the grain, we'll see. And this test piece I'm just
gonna take the clamps off and watch over here because
whenever you bend wood, regardless of what process you use, there's a phenomenon called springback where it doesn't stay exactly at the shape you
thought it was gonna be, and it springs back to be
a little bit straighter than you originally wanted. Look at that, that's a
pretty significant amount of springback here, that's almost, almost 3/4ths of an inch. All right so this is
getting really interesting, as I let this piece sit for a little bit, the springback increased and
then putting my hands on this I can kind of feel the
moisture in the board. When you feel that cold
clamminess you know there's more moisture in there. So I think I took it out of the form a little bit too soon, so
because I have two of these to do and I don't wanna spend
six days waiting for each one of these to dry and do the next one. Wait for that to dry. I think I'm left with the
only choice is to make a second form, if I have
two forms I can clamp them both at the same time and
then after a two day dry time, three if it's necessary I'll take them out and I should be good to go. Another option would be to
actually double the thickness of the form, use a wider
board, bend it all at once and then after it's dry
band saw it down the middle and they're exactly the same
and you have your two pieces. The reason I'm not doing that? Is because I think it's
a lot harder to get good, even clamping pressure
that would keep this piece from sort of cupping and just
becoming a little bit wobbly. I think it's much easier
to clamp a narrow piece. So I mean it feels wasteful
to use all that sheet stock to do this but I don't see
any other way to do this and actually get it done in
a reasonable amount of time. (saw screeching) (sander humming) So while the first one really didn't leak, I did see a little bit of
water pooling at the joint so I figured this time let's
get some silicone caulk in there 'cause I don't
wanna go buy any PVC cement and that should do the trick. (mumbling) Yeah this guy over here,
yeah that's good that's good, that's safe, that yeah do more of that. There we go, waste not, want not. All right so got my two ski
pieces about a half inch thick, I went about two and a quarter inches wide to match my bending form and
we'll let these go overnight. So I went to plug in the
steamer for the second round of steaming here and I
noticed a lot of steam, and water was coming out the back. Apparently, and I don't
know when I did it. But I must have dropped
something on this because I have a massive crack
that goes all the way down into the reservoir and
this thing is pretty much unusable at this point,
I did try to tape it and see if that would work
but it's just not building the steam pressure that you
need to get the box steaming. So thankfully I have a Rockler
that's nearby I was able to go and pick up another
unit but there's just some irony in the fact that
I've held onto this thing for almost six years, finally use it and on its second use I
screw it up and break it. So this does have me thinking though should I build something for this? Maybe if I do a lot more steaming in the future I might
get into my own little propane setup and cobble
something together that way, that's a little bit more
durable and reliable. But for the amount that I'm
doing this at this point, it was worth it to just buy another one and just get this project moving forward. So what are you gonna do? I'll put the pieces in
the steamer for about 30 to 40 minutes, Jason
wasn't around to help me with the clamping this time
so Nichole was kind enough to jump in and help out,
unfortunately we're moving just a little bit slower than is ideal, you'll see the results in
a moment for this bend. On the second bend I decided
to go it alone which was a really dumb idea it took me way too long and as you'll see the
results are no bueno. Well we definitely have our first failures at this point, I got a lot of
checking in the first piece I tried to bend and just
a outright split here in the second piece and these
are toast at this point. But you know what we gotta think about it. We gotta think about why
this might have happened. Of course the wood is sort of an X factor, sometimes things just
aren't gonna go your way. But I think in this case
there's one thing that's very different between these pieces and my practice pieces and
that's the amount of time they had to soak, these guys I gave them, less than 24 hours it was
just an overnight soak. The other pieces not intentionally
but because I got so busy with other things they
soaked for about three days and with this kiln dried
stock I think that's making a difference, it could very well be. So what I'm going to do now is make some extra pieces, that's
another lesson learned here. Is to not just cut the
exact number you need. Cut some extra because
if you have a failure and you're doing this soaking process. I could already have
pieces in here that are now 24 hours soaked and it
would save me a lot of time. So this time around I've got
four pieces just in case, and I'm gonna drop 'em
in this little soak tank and let them go for a few days. I don't really trust doing
anything sooner than that at this point, so I mean this
is something we could get upset about you know this
will definitely put a damper on the day but ultimately
failure is a part of the learning process,
failure equals experience, and the more you fail
the more you find ways to succeed because you've
already figured out the ways to fail, that's
what I'm telling myself. So at this point we're just going to dunk these guys in there, and
we'll see them in a few days. So I am super excited because
I just got a little gift from a gentleman named Chris, my new hero. Who supplied me with an air
dried slab of white oak. Now I still have my other pieces soaking. I still plan to see how
that affects the bend. But I think I might push
forward with the project using this air dried stock. Now doing some research
it seems some people say when it's an air dried
piece you don't need to do any kind of soak you just
make sure you steam it sufficiently, other people say
you should probably soak it for a little bit to bring
the moisture content up. Especially if you're in
a place like Denver where the general relative humidity is very low. Which means the wood isn't gonna have as much moisture in it. So I think I'm going to go
with a good, strong steaming. I have enough material
here that I might have a couple of runs to try it out. I don't need much but
we're gonna cut it up and see what happens. (saw whirring) (saw screeching) All right so before I
take this air dried stock and start the steaming process,
I'm really going to evaluate what I've done so far and
try to improve things. One thing that I've
learned is really important is this concept of a backing
strap that not only holds the world piece in place
but it supports the fibers and encourages compression of the fibers. When it comes to wood, wood does not like to necessarily stretch right? That's when you get those splits and breaks but it can compress. So a strap like this
with blocks on the ends that actually go right
up against the workpiece as you're bending it and
this piece wants to get a little bit longer, this
compression strap is holding everything in and causing
the wood to compress and not stretch and this
is kind of a mainstay of steam bending so it was
just one of those things where I wanted to see what
I could get away with, and apparently I can't get away with much. So I decided to make
the compression strap. Also made a few modifications to my forms including a 90 degree angle
where I need a little bit more clamping pressure and
then changing this back angle so that it's perfectly parallel
with the front bend angle and that'll allow me to
get the clamps in place. All right so very quickly,
let me show you how I made this little compression strap. All I needed were some
hardwood scraps for the ends, a couple lengths of rolled
steel strap material, and some nuts and bolts. The design for this compression
strap is roughly modeled after the one in Lon Schleining's book, Wood Bending Made Simple. Look for the Amazon link in
the description if you'd like to pick up a copy, I'd
highly recommend it. On one end we use the hardwood to sandwich the two straps and lock them in place. To make the straps easier to work with, and protect the wood. I'm putting a layer of packing
tape across the surface. Now the length of the strap
is customized for this project so I'll drop in one of my work pieces and use it to locate the
block at the other end. (drill whirring) And that's our compression strap. So before I throw these
guys into the steam chamber I'm going to take my block
plane and just ease that sharp corner, now I don't know
if this is really gonna work. But somebody on Instagram
told me about this and they said it does help
prevent splits from starting, and who am I to argue? All right so I'm going to
give these a little bit more time than the last one, I
think we'll go for 40 minutes an hour, or however long
it takes me to eat lunch. Now I really feel like
I'm doing this properly, air dried lumber, a little
extra steaming time, a compression strap, this better work. After the piece cools we
remove it from the form and transfer it to a second
form, where the piece can dry. This frees up the compression strap, and we can move on to the second piece. All right so these things
have been in the forms for about two days now,
they spent a good portion of that time in front of my fireplace, not right up on it but a little bit behind so I figure it's a good way for it to get a little bit of extra heat and it might help the wood
dry a little bit faster. So hopefully that's enough
time for these things to be set in their shape,
so we are going to remove the clamps and see what we've got. Okay that looks pretty decent. So when I put the piece
up against the form I can see how much springback we got, and it is no more than a half inch, so that is not bad at all and
if you recall we cut this form a little bit more to
account for springback, and that's about as much as I removed. It was like a half inch so I
think we are right on target at this point, and although
we are concerned about how much springback we get
the most important thing on this project is not
so much the exact angle that we take on here,
but the fact that these are going to be the same right? 'Cause if these are two runners on a sled and are totally different
it's not going to work very well so when I put these to together, there's a slight difference between them. But there's enough flex in here that we should have no
problem getting these to do exactly what we need them to do. So yeah air dried not so bad. All right so because I can't
leave well enough alone, still have some kiln dried
material that has been soaking, and I really wanna see if I bend that now will I have any better
luck than I did before? That's where I had my big split. So we're gonna take the two forms, even though I have the
work pieces already. I just wanna see are those easier to bend? I'll check them after we bend them and see is these any kind of cracking, just another data point
for me to understand a little bit more about this process. Now these kiln dried pieces
had several days to soak and I could really feel
how waterlogged they are, but we bent them both and let
them dry for several days. You'll see the results here in a minute. So now that I have a
couple of successful bends behind me and I need to
move on to other things. I'm going to draw some
initial conclusions about the results that I saw. You know if you're
experienced in steam bending or you talk to an old pro
whose been doing this forever. Some of this may be common
sense to those people. But the reason I go though this process, is to prove to myself not just
accept other people's word for it but prove to
myself what's necessary, what's not, what has an
impact, and what doesn't. So first conclusion I've come to? Is that with air dried material
I don't necessarily think the soaking makes a
whole lot of difference. I had pieces that weren't soaked
and they bent just the same as pieces that soaked for several
days with fabric softener. The only real difference
is the pieces that soaked were more waterlogged
which means that they take longer to dry, the process
takes that much longer and I think if you
introduce that much water. You do have potential for
things to maybe go wrong. It maybe doesn't need to be there. So in the future with air dried lumber I don't think I would go through any type of soaking process. Now some of this may certainly
depend on the condition of the wood, the moisture
content that you receive it in. Air dried can be all over the map. That warrants further investigation, but at least initially I'm gonna say that the water soak doesn't
really seem to do a whole lot at least I didn't for me. Now the next thing would be steaming. I don't know if it's
elevation we're in Denver here so the high elevation may
be a factor I don't know. But it seems like I had to
steam a little bit longer than what the literature
generally recommends. That is again something
depending on where you live, the effectiveness of your steam box and how much steam you're
actually able to get in there. These are all factors and
variables that are kinda hard to predict, so for me I just
found a longer steam time was a little bit more effective. Now I know a lot of people do bends without a compression strap, but from what I've seen
it looks like a necessity. I don't think I would attempt a steam bend in the future without one. It made a huge difference,
in fact it made it possible. The bends were just not
working out until I started using the compression strap. Now dry time that's something
that I really would like to do more research on, do test pieces and make everything else the same. The only thing that changes
is how long it dries in the clamps in a warm
environment, does 24 hours give more springback than a
48 hour or a four day, five day time in the clamps. So I can't really say
a whole lot about that other than the fact that I
would give my pieces at least 24 hours in a nice dry and warm
area, preferably really warm like in front of a fireplace
or something or a room that you can put a space
heater in and keep it nice and warm in there. Now let's talk about kiln dried wood. That is where some of the
most surprising results were and where I guess some of
the most cautionary tales are going to come from
with my experience here. Let me show you the damage I'm looking at. Now you've already seen this piece, this is one of the first kiln
dried pieces that wound up splitting we had a really
big break on that one, but if you look along this face. You should see these stress fractures and it's all the way down the piece. Even on the straightaway
where there really wasn't a whole lot of pressure applied, we have these fractures here,
that's really concerning. Now if you look at a piece that was soaked a little bit longer and
then given the bend. It didn't break, we were able
to get a successful bend. But look at the condition of the surface, and this is at the bend. Again look at the straightaway, right? It's got all of these little
stress fractures in there and you even see them
on the inside as well. So while the soak does
seem to be necessary to get a bend that doesn't
just split and break. It does introduce another
variable with that moisture and the loss of that
moisture over the course of a couple of days
creates all this checking in the surface, I'm still
trying to figure this one out. I know people do successful
bends with kiln dried material all the time but right
now all I can tell you is right now with these particular boards, no matter how long I soaked
or how short I soaked, I wind up with this checking
in the surface, right? Now I've also taken some
boards that were kiln dried and soaked for days,
these were just loaded with moisture, I didn't
get a chance to bend these. These were just test pieces
that I didn't actually bend. These have not checked so it's the process of the compression strap and
the bend, whatever that does to the wood causes that checking and it doesn't seem to do
it in the air dried material whether it was soaked or not right, it's just the kiln dried. Initial observations for me. I do think I've come
to the conclusion that if I'm gonna do this again
I'm gonna have to find air dried material there
are just too many variables it's too difficult for
someone who doesn't do this all the time to get the
kiln dried stuff to work with this application. So spoiler alert here's what those runners are going to become,
this is the little sled that I made for my kids and this will be our next project video. Now if you have suggestions for resources, any tips from your experiences
about steam bending please go ahead and leave
them in the comments and while you're there, why
don't you give this video a like if you enjoyed it, and subscribe. I don't usually ask
for that kind of stuff, but hey we're here, why not let's do it. I also have a suggestion for you guys. This is a book I've had on
my shelf for a long time it's Wood Bending Made
Simple by Lon Schleining and it covers not just steam bending but also bent lamination
and a couple other methods. It's a really good resource
I used this multiple times throughout this process to kind of just be a foundation when I
need to just up my game a little bit and go to that next level, learning about compression
straps and all that stuff. So you can get this on Amazon. All right so thanks
for watching everybody, we'll catch you next time.
