Creating a Bent Lamination

This is fun if you wanna make curved wooden pieces in your shot, couple ways you can do this. One is to steam wood and then take one big solid piece and bend it into shape. Another way to do it is what's called bent lamination. That's what I'm gonna do with bent lamination we have a bunch of individual pieces of wood. We force them into a curve with glue in between each layer and we end up with something cool like this.

So a couple of things going into this, we gotta do a little bit of homework. One Type on extend is a really good glue choice for this. The reason being I have lots and lots of strips here I'm gonna put glue on, so it's gonna take a while to get that glue applied. So working with Extend gives you more time to make everything happen. The approach to this will be to figure out what it is you wanna make, what's the curve I'm trying to achieve.

Once I know that, then you can work with your strips and see how thin do they need to be in order to conform to that curve. These are a little under 1/8 of an inch thick red oak and zebra wood, and I experimented with the strips and I experimented with curve to make sure all this was gonna work and it does the form itself. Is made out of plywood. We want that to be fairly robust because it takes some pressure to get everything to close. So in this case it's 3 layers a half inch plywood that matches the thickness of my bent laminations and it gives me plenty of material to clamp onto.

One of the things we don't want to do is glue our form to the work, so a little bit of Tyvek tape, house wrap tape is a good preemptive strike to make sure glue won't stick to your form. Let's talk about extend. One of the things you want to do if this bottle has set a little bit. I take a stir stick. And get it down to the bottom of the jar.

We just wanna make sure there's not stuff kind of like stirring paint. We wanna make sure there's not a big. Mud ball in the bottom of the bottle and if there is then just stir it up to make sure that it's good to go. This one's actually looking pretty consistent throughout. And a roller.

is a great way to cover all of this real estate we have to cover. And then from there We're gonna get glue. And The faces of all our parts. Now This Goes here. Get those top surfaces aligned.

Bring in the other component. And a slightly longer clamp. Would make this a little bit easier. I'm gonna work with what I got dance with the one who brought me now what makes life easier at this stage instead of closing closing closing is grab some quick clamps. And start with these.

And that takes up a lot of the slack. So one of the things I'm watching as I go to get my uniform curve. Is that this. Halfmoon is in the right spot left to right, the positive profile relative to the negative profile. And I'll adjust if I need to.

But that looks pretty good. Then once you're close. We can go to The bar clamps They'll give us a little bit more pressure. Now Gonna let that glue dry, come back and have a look at this once the glue is dry and we can pop it out. With a couple of days of cure time.

We're gonna please release me. Let me go see what we have here. It's kind of nice it's still in that shape. One of the things that will happen when you do bent laminations is we'll force it into that curve and then there's gonna be a little bit of what's called spring back so we may not have the exact curve here that we had in the form. You have to experiment with that a little bit so that when you're done you have the exact shape you want let me clean this up and then I will come right back and we'll have a look at just how cool this is.

We have that we have our extend glue. I'm very happy with the working time that that gave me to get this whole thing put together. You saw lots and lots of layers, lots and lots of parts to put together. The extend is definitely a benefit. Final result.

That bent lamination looks great. I love the contrast between the red oak and the zebra wood. This is a very fun thing to mess around with an experiment with different thicknesses of strips, contrasting colors, different form shapes incorporate this into your woodworking, and you can make cool curvy stuff like I did.