Bending Practice

Thursday, February 19, 2009.

Been trying my hand at bending wood for the last couple of nights - with limited success. This is not the easiest thing to do, I have found, and there are a lot of differing opinions and methods out there about how to do it. As per both Mr. Siminoff’s and Mr. Troughton’s advice, I am using a steel pipe heated with a propane torch.





I purchased some practice wood from Stewart-MacDonald and I am really glad I did. Not only did I destroy all of that, I was able to learn quite a bit in the process. One of the things I learned about the practice wood itself is that it arrives much thicker than you need. Mine came in at a shade over 3/16” thick, or about double the thickness I ended up wanting. I figured this out after destroying the first of the two pieces I bought. It wasn’t until I had actually started bending on the second piece that I decided to sand it to a more reasonable thickness. Here are the best results I came up with:

Just three small pieces out of everything I tried.

These are some pictures my wife took while I tried to bend a piece that was both too thick and too wide.

Some of the other things I have learned are:

1. Making the wood really wet (soaking it) is a BAD thing. Using minimal moisture is better.


2. Letting the pipe get really hot is a BAD thing. As Mr. Siminoff suggests, the pipe should only be allowed to get hot enough to let a drop of water boil off. Anything hotter is too hot. This, for my rig, means setting the torch to about as low of a flame as I can.


3. The thicker the wood, the harder it is to bend. Once I got my wood to about 0.1” thick, bending it without breaking was much easier.

I have ordered more practice wood, too. I figure it probably makes sense to bend that to the correct shape, at least once, before committing to the real thing.

Arrival!

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Woohoooo! My first package arrived in the mail today!


It turned out to be my European Spruce Top Wood and my practice side wood (the mandolin in the picture is for size reference - I just couldn’t think of a better reference). This order came from Stewart-MacDonald and it arrived unbelievably quickly. I placed my order on Saturday, they got it out their door (according to their email) on Monday, and it was received at my doorstep on Wednesday. Pretty good service, in my book.

Here is what I got.


Each of the two items came in two pieces. The Top wood is a single wedge cut board split down the middle and the practice wood is two pieces taped together (mandolin for reference again).


It never occurred to me that the two pieces of the top wood would come still joined together, but it’s pretty obvious when I think about it that this makes it impossible for anyone to question whether they are a book-matched set when they arrive this way. This picture shows both ends and where they stopped sawing at the one end. Each of the two pieces is 6” wide by 17” long and measures 3/8” thick on the thin edge and 1” thick on the thick edge.


This just shows that the practice wood arrived as two pieces taped together. They are each 4” wide by 25” long and just a horse-hair under 1/8” thick.

There really isn’t a whole lot I can do with these right now, even if I wanted to. About the only things I could do are, of course, practice bending and separate the two top pieces. If the old axiom “use it or lose it” holds true here, seems like practicing bending before I’m ready to bend the real thing would be a bit risky. Likewise, since I don’t have the hide-glue yet with which to glue together my book-matched top pieces, there is not much value in cutting them apart right now, either.

Guess I’ll go do some more surfing...