Woods Good For Bent Lamination

So your best bet with heavilyt curved parts is to either steam bed the material to shape or do a bent lamination.

Woods good for bent lamination.

The technique to produce the laminate is called lamination. Pictured left you can see a closeup of one of the rockers on my maloof inspired rocker. What you need to use for bent wood lamination is 1 8 bending poplar plywood that comes in either long or short grain. Epoxy is also a good choice for bent laminations but it costs almost twice as much as urea formaldehyde.

The concept is actually pretty simple. Quite a while back i did a series of glue tests on bent laminations. These sheets come in 4 x 8. A laminate is simply anything made up of two or more layers of material.

It s a urea formaldehyde glue with three shades of powdered catalyst to better match the wood you re using. It also cleans up easily with water. If your radii is tight you can use 1 16 wisa italian bending plywood. The process starts with ripping some thin strips of wood and applying glue to each strip.

Bent lamination just introduces the element of curving the laminate. If you ve ever glued two pieces of wood together face to face you ve essentially created a laminate. It s messy but rewarding to see a gracefully bent piece of wood emerge from a glue encrusted form. It just seems that these are good choices for my first attempt at bent lamination because of the open time.

I recommend unibond 800. The more seams you have the less chance for springback. Standard wood glue is not the best choice for bent laminations. 10 layers 1 8 at about 5 radius after the glue had cured for 24 hours on the form the parts were laid aside for at least a week.

This is a perfect example of a situation where bent lamination is a good choice.