Steam bending wood, 1" thick kiln dried ash.

[Music] the top for this mountain stage is what I was requested to bend the bows for and this is the pattern and measurements that I was sent to the right are pictures of an original coach still on display so the first thing I needed to do was make the form that I could bend the bows around this is just some scrap 2x6 material that I had around it doesn't have to be very fancy and you see here the inside radius needs to be seven and three-quarters of an inch so I took a piece of plywood and I made a pattern that I could pattern off of for the end of these two by sixes now these bows need to be 55 and 3/4 outside so I'm going to undersized this to accommodate the thickness of the bow itself and to allow for spring back when I actually bend these bows at least two by sixes aren't quite wide enough as they stand by themselves so I'm gonna add a little piece to each end for additional depth in the radius these forms don't have to be pretty they just have to be structurally strong enough to withstand the pressure when the wood is being bent in the center I'm going to add a steel post that I use to adapt this form to my bending press so when I build my press I designed it to accept a variety of forms and this is just one of the styles that I use on this press now if you watch my video on steam bending sheep wagon bows this is the band that I used when I bent those bows underneath this band I have some pipes welded to different positions I'm going to bring my cable ends in to a closer position and attempt to use this band when I first Bend my said a boat we're gonna find out eventually in this video why this was not the best idea now the plans called for one-inch thick ash inch and 3/4 inch wide to make these bows so I selected the lumber I wanted to use and went ahead and build it to size now the order was for 15 bows so I needed to go through and decide which ones were actually bendable the rule of thumb is less than one inch of run-out per foot in the grain this piece you can see here is way sharper than that so I'm actually going to take and reject this one set it aside but most of these you can see the grain run-out is about right at a foot so I'm going to consider these bendable and I'm going to use a quarter inch roundover bit and just take off the sharp corners the boiler that I use for steaming is coal-fired and it has about a 20 to 25 gallon capacity I take general household ammonia non sudsing and I'll add about 2 cups to the boiler itself this will add to the penetration of the steam when they are in the steam tank when I begin to show signs of steam I'm going to load up 3 and Bend three at a time as this begins to build pressure you can see some suds starting to come out around the door I'm going to go ahead and put a Center mark on my form so I know where to line up my banding then from my notch that shows the center on this band I'm going to measure back three and a half feet because the board's I'm going to bend initially are 7 feet so at these marks I'm going to clamp boards on the band to act as stops and remember when we're bending wood everything has to be compression so I don't want these bows when they come out of the steamer to be able to stretch but I want to kink them contained so that all the bending goes into compression this board on the right I'm going to clamp down fairly securely then I'm going to take one of the extra pieces as a yardstick so to speak I'm going to put it in to show me about where the location of my board on the left needs to be this one I'm not going to clamp securely until I actually put the bows in getting ready to be bent now I always bend under pressure which helps force the steam and the moisture in and since this material is kiln dry - one inch thick I've allowed it to cook for two hours now I'm ready to go ahead and get some bent the block on the Left does not yet clamp securely so I'm going to go ahead and tap it into place so it butts up against my boughs and now you can see where I have five clamps on each end of these bows so while this is bending I've got the camera moving around I'm a little jumpy so I apologize for the quick movements [Music] the left side came up fairly straight but the right side was a little behind so I took they come along and brought it into position so when I finish this been digested both sides to where they were fairly straight up and down and here it actually looks like they've bent pretty well to get these off the form eventually I need to have some framework to contain them in so I've quickly built biceps these bows have now set for a couple hours and cooled down so I can take them off and put them into this little framework that they're gonna dry in now through this short little clip I've actually stopped it twice to let you see that the amount of spring go back was about four inches overall two inches on each end right here you can see is standing up I have to push it down about four inches and here once again so I could just end the video and show you this and say everything went really well and that's how you do it the truth is that isn't so I looked at these and there were a couple of bows that had these stretch marks on the outside of the band so I went back to examine why as I measured between my two blocks I see the blocks had stretched out been pushed out about an inch so my five clamps were not sufficient to keep this wood contained also my four inches of spring back needed to be accounted for so I'm going to take my form off knowing that I'm going to now over bend I need to over bend about two inches when I do that I don't want this sharp corner to put a crease into the bowl so I'm gonna take and round this corner off on both ends of my form [Music] another thing I'm going to change is the style of the band I have some bands that I use when I bend to inch stick part wood and there I've welded ends on on each end of two by quarter inch angle irons I'm going to use these bands now to bend the next set of bows and these will not be allowed to stretch also the pulleys on my press they change the direction of the cables I'm going to drop that down so that my direction of inward pull is lowered I also keep some 1/8 inch banding handy as quick shims to accommodate for any variation in length so if my wood is a little short I'm going to put whatever I need in to shim it out to keep it as tight as possible against these ends so now we're going to try this once again [Music] again if you've watched my other steam bending video you know that this press runs at 1800 to one reduction so it moves fairly slowly [Music] so as the ends of these bows start to get close to vertical my cables are pulling more upward than inward so I'm actually going to stop it and I'll use some come along to have a direct end pull I'm going to put a come-along on each side and actually bring these in to over bend them to compensate for the spring back [Music] [Music] now you can see I have them over bent but I'm gonna take a carpenter square and actually adjust these so I have two inches on both sides over bent this should allow for the two inches of spring back that that's going to occur the right side initially I had three inches the left side was not quite two inches so I made a couple adjustments to where we had two inches on each side [Music] so as the finished Bend this is what I ended up with after these have set for at least two hours I'm going to take these off and put them into the framework we'll look at them closely and see if they're going to work now if you look at the top of these bowls you can see that they actually kind of recurve backwards a little bit we're going to address that in a minute so now they go into the framework with hardly any downward pressure at all they turned out really well these no longer showed any sign of any stretch marks having the solid ends made all the difference now this is the recurve on the end of the bows since there are still moisture in these I can take them and actually put them in a vise and straighten this back out by causing the the inward fibers to stretch back out this wood is still fairly elastic and pliable at this stage so this is our finished product these actually add some pretty nice straight grain no buckling on the inside no stretching on the outside we have our fifty five and three quarter inch OD that our pattern called for we are a one-inch thick an inch and 3/4 wide bending three at a time we have almost five and a half inches of width that we bent at one time here we have a second set of bows and we finally ended up with all five so we had our 15 bows I had three that I had rejected because the run out was worse than the 1 inch and 12 inches there were some wavy grain and these were not ideal so just for demonstration purposes I put these three and the steamer and put them through the same process as I did all the rest just to show that you don't always have to have perfect ideal lumber if you have the correct banding and that they are contained properly even less than ideal kiln-dried hardwood lumber will Bend this run out was in about 5 inches and even the wavy grain bent there was no stretching on the outside and these actually were usable bows I didn't include these bows in the order of the 15 I just bent these for example purposes so these are our 15 bows thanks for watching [Music] you

Channel: EngelsCoachShop

Views: 1,183,261

Rating: 4.8667665 out of 5

Keywords: Steam bending wood, dave engle, dave engel, wagon building, stagecoaches, stagecoach building, wagon shops, wheelwright, Steam bending 1, engels coach shop, engles coach shop

Id: b9UPihp04xY

Length: 21min 30sec (1290 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 13 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/AhabFXseas]

Anyone who enjoyed this or the Borax wheel vid (same shop, same yt channel) should really consider watching the whole Borax wagon project playlist. It's long (like 4 hours or something), but the scope and scale of the project is epic (to give you an idea, the empty 3-wagon train weighs something like 18,000 lbs, and they fabricate the whole thing from scratch).

It's a really cool mix of woodworking and blacksmithing, and they combine traditional and more modern techniques is a really ingenious way. Plus, the historical aspect adds another dimension to it- the wagons were originally built to make 10-day (each way) trips hauling ore out of Death Valley.

Anyway, it's one of the best things I've seen on youtube, and it deserves way more views than it currently has.

[u/ulrikft]

Love this, great video!

[u/funkfield]

Sometimes think the video making is artisanal in itself. The pace. The narrative. The shots. Fantastic stuff.

[u/nvisible]

I love it when the craftsman includes mistakes ans errors. I learn a lot from seeing someone correct a problem.

Great video. Thanks for sharing.

[u/johnmcl69]

I love everything about this video. My fav is not just the techniques and tools and “mistakes” (I prefer outcomes) but also how the sound is included in the sped up video. Never stop including that.