I love bending wood. Its one of my favorite aspects of woodworking because it allows you to create even more interesting shapes and designs. Bending wood used to seem so scary and difficult, almost like magic. Well, after learning how it's done, I can safely say that the difficult part is merely getting your head around the idea that you can do tons of different wood bending at home.
The first type of wood bending I want to go over is steam bending. There are many ways to steam wood, but I'm going to talk about what is the safest and easiest way I have seen to do it. Here at the Infinity Tools shop, we carry the Earlex Steam Generator. This simple device is basically a wallpaper steamer with a very nice brass steam box adapter.
Looks fairly simple, right? It really is. This little device merely needs to be screwed together and filled with water and inserted into your steam box. That's it. This is so much simpler than any other way I've ever seen it done (you might need to hook up two to do large quantities or if you have a very large steam box).
I decided to make my steam box out of Schedule 40 PVC pipe as it creates a very simple solution for relatively little cost. Mine ran around $17.00 for a 1/4" dowel, some 4" PVC pipe and two end caps. I also grabbed a meat thermometer to keep track of the temperature inside the steam chamber.
Make sure the plug and drain are set up on a downward slope. Since you don't glue the caps, if too much pressure builds up, the caps will easily pop off, preventing an explosion. Plug the Earlex in and wait for steam and heat to come.
When steaming lumber, you typically want to use air-dried or green lumber as they bend way better and with a lot less splintering and breakage than kiln-dried lumber. (I used some kiln-dried walnut on this test because I had it lying around and knew it would bend ok, just not as good as air-dried).
You want your steam box temperature to stay at or around 212°. My setup here stayed at 213° for 2 hours with no problems.
A general rule of thumb is to steam the lumber for one hour per inch of thickness. Kiln-dried lumber may take longer.
This is very hot steam making the wood very hot. When you pull the cap off the PVC or open the door of your wooden steam box, hot steam comes out. You then reach your hand in and grab very hot lumber. Wear protection.
If you're using a form to bend the wood, you'll need metal band straps over the wood or it will break and splinter as you bend it.
Oh, look, it's time to pull out my wood. I decided to bend it over the closest round form I had — my drill press.
Well, that bent pretty nicely. You can see the different bend achieved by different thicknesses. Don't be afraid to experiment, steam-bending is easy with the Earlex Steam Generator and some PVC pipe.
