Steam Bending Wood...

[triplefreak]

Is there any wood that can't be steam bent? I want to make myself a segmented cane, and steam bend the handle on it.
I want to use mesquite & oak for the segments.
Can segmented wood be bent after it's glued together?
Anyone got any plans for making a home made steamer?
Thanks for any help.

[TDHofstetter]

I doubt there's any wood that CANNOT be steam-bent, but some woods are definitely more challenging to steam-bend than others. Ash is among the best - it's nearly always chosen for that characteristic. No idea how well mesquite steam-bends, but ash is a very good substitute for oak...

Segmented stuff would be far better segmented after the fact; the act of steaming is VERY likely to weaken & loosen the glue joints. Remember, you're heating the wood to (or above) the boiling point of water, and flooding it with moisture.

MarC used to steam-bend wood - a LOT of it - and so can lend some guidance... a very simple steamer can be made from a brand-new STEEL gas or kerosene can (never had gas or kerosene in it EVER) and a radiator hose & some sort of enclosure sized according to the piece you want to steam. You can get by for a while with a PVC steam box, or you can build one from wood. The radiator hose extends from the smaller spout on the gas can (which is full of boiling water) to the steambox. The steambox has a hatch on the business end (through which you load & unload it), and floods of crazy hot steam flow through the steam box from end to end (or from center to both ends), permitted to escape through ventilation holes. Without those vent holes, you'll just be building a steam bomb.

[woodmangler]

woodhelp.com/Tips.htm#Steambending

Read up a little... I will check here often to help ya out...

You can't steambend after it's glued... or it wont be glued any more

Use a jig to steam bend the different woods, and once dry they will all be very close to the same shape and will glue up easily.

You can steam bend almost any wood, but like Tim said Ash bends easy... I use to use Oak exclusively and it bends well also. As long as the grain runs true lengthwise and it is thin enough it will bend.

[sawduster]

This might be better moved to General Woodworking but . . .

What I would do if I was making a cane from mesquite is to slice the mesquite into strips maybe 1/16"- 3/32" thick. You could cold bend them, but bending that tightly for the handle of a cane would require, I think, a combination of steam bending and laminating. Heat a few of the strips, maybe three or four at a time, then pull them out and wrap them stacked onto you mold, and clamp them down. Let them cool, then take the clamps off. You're likely to get some spring back but no big deal. Apply glue to the strips and laminate them on your mold, clamping down again and let the glue dry. I'd use urea formaldehyde glue rather than yeller or white glue. I like the Weldwood Plastic Resin Glue available at ACE and easy to use, simply add water.

Heat up your next batch of strips, form them onto the ones you already did and repeat as above.

The thinner strips won't have to be heated for as long as thicker stuff, but you do need to work fast with them because they lose heat fast as well. If you work with just the bent portion and a little more, you could likely save a lot of time by heating in the microwave wrapped in a dampened towel. It is the heat more so than the moisture in steaming that loosens the bonds in the wood that allow you to bend it, and then those bonds reharden as they cool. You could use a scarf joint to glue the handle portion on the long leg.

Anyway, once you have you square in cross section cane all bent, you could use either hand tools or a router with a round over bit of the proper size to make it into a round cross section.

[triplefreak]

What I'm thinking of doing is cutting small pieces of oak & mesquite, gluing them together into a straight board. Then, turn that on my lathe & make the shaft of the cane. Then, I was going to glue up another set of small cut pieces, and glue them into a block big enough to cut out on a bandsaw.
This will be for the handle of the cane.
I was going to cut out a "U", then sand & rasp it until it's round.
Then, join the handle to the shaft with some kind of steel rod & some epoxy.

Would this work?

[rhull]

I think the handle would be highly prone to break along the grain someplace in that "U", with what you're proposing. Especially if one is putting some/all of their weight on that handle.