Steam Bending Red Oak | Wagon Building | Wheelwright | Engels

[Music] this is also called an axial hound the only difference is it's bent out of one piece this was brought to me to be replaced it is showing signs of stress and fractures when it was bent originally probably a hundred years ago so I need to make a form that we can bend this around and my forms don't have to be fancy they just have to be structurally sound I have a couple pieces of 3/4 inch subflooring and I'm going to make a pattern out of these now I know there's going to be a certain amount of spring back when I bend these so I'm going to over bend these about an inch on both sides these two sheets of OSB boards are only an inch and a half thick so I'm going to have to add some spacers again nothing fancy but it'll work all the stress as a bend will be handled by the OSB board these pieces are just spacers [Music] now initially I put my post extension for my bending press on this form but it ended up being about six inches too long so I made a second one now because of the style of this Bend I have a second set of pulleys that changes directions of my cables so my right cables pulls to the left my left cable pulls to the right now the wood that does not bend around the forum needs to remain straight so I'm gonna put a block on top to help keep it straight as we'll find out this block wasn't heavy enough now I'd like my band to be relatively straight when I put the steamed wood into it so I'm gonna prop it up to take the bend out of the band now the wood I'm gonna bend is red oak it has not been killed right as we can see here there's a lot of moisture almost 40% it's a nice straight piece of red oak the grain is straight almost from end to end in the entire ten feet we're going to bend inch and 3/4 thick by three and a half wide this will be in the steamer for two hours now I have a band that will keep this completely in case they have angle iron ends on both ends if we remember from previous videos we cannot allow this wood to stretch being steamed this piece of oak is soft enough and I can push it down under the form [Music] now I set the camera up focused on the bend itself in a minute I'm going to make some adjustments on top that you can't really see but that's just my fall to setting up the camera this whole bending press operates at 1801 so it's fairly slow now I knew I was gonna run out of room on the ends of my cables so I welded a second loop on the end of my bands I'm going to take a clamp and hold them in position back off the cables get a second hold and start again now with these clamps I'm just tightening the wood against the top of the form now this is where you can see I was a little closer to my pulleys than I liked better it bent really well usually when I'm bending two-inch-thick material I'll leave it on the form for 10 or 12 hours to let it cool down you can see the inch of spring back that we allowed for when we made our form [Music] now our curve is pretty close that you can see I'm a little wide on the tips now the section that should remain straight actually has a little bow out now since all bending involves compression the process of compressing actually puts a pressure toward the end this is what caused the ends of the wood to push out that's where I needed a heavier piece of wood on top to counteract that pressure so by blocking the inside curve I can actually pull these legs back to straight where they need to be as you'll see I actually pull them a little past where they need to be and there is no sign of any stretching or cracking during the process of bending knowing that there are still moisture within the wood I'll put them on the stove to heat them up and it will actually relax the bend in the meantime I'm going to do this again and make a few adjustments with a second Bend since the band's ended up being so close to my pulleys I'm going to drop the form another four inches everything else remains the same but I need a little taller block also I'll also use heavier boards this time to keep the leg straight [Music] this time I had a little more clearance which was nice and I didn't have the recurve like I did on the first one [Music] [Music] by just adding heat we can relax the backward bend and you can see it was quite effective both of these ended up being very useful one piece axial hounds appreciate you watching [Music] you

Channel: EngelsCoachShop

Views: 135,816

Rating: 4.9266572 out of 5

Keywords: Steam Bending wood, wagon building, engles coach, engels coach, carriage building, wagon shops, steam bend oak, steam bend red oak, wheelwright, carriages, wagons, buggys, how to steam bend

Id: R_cyx7ti1B4

Length: 19min 25sec (1165 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 23 2018