Bending maple strips

Manfred-Klose

does anyone have any experience doing this?

i've cut up alot of maple strips long ago in hope to use it for as a guitar binding, i might have a use for it now.

the maple strips is about 2mm thick.

so far i tried:
*letting it lay in warm water for a few minutes, slowly bend it into place and tape it to the guide of how it should bend.
*it worked, but at the weak points in the wood(the stuff that looks nice ) it was a bit fragile.

so i did some reading on the internet, and seems like laying it in water will only weaken it.
the method seems to be to spray with a little bit of water, wrap it in foil, and use either a heat gun, or hair dryer to bend it in place.

any ideas ?

rikus

The way the amateur guitar builder do it is with a bending pipe.

You basically have a length of pipe (like a piece of mild steel exhaust pipe) that you heat up.

You wet the wood and bend it over the hot pipe bit by bit, measuring against your jig/guitar. The pipe needs to be hot enough to sizzle a water drop on contact (from what I remember, but double check if you want to try this). The water on/in the wood steams and makes the wood supple, allowing you to bend it.

Pipe bender at the top of the page.

http://gicl.cs.drexel.edu/people/sevy/luthierie/guitarmaking_guide/side_bending/side_bending.html

Manfred-Klose

awesome link dude.

i also found this one over the weekend(after i tried to figure it out myself and failed)
http://www.tdpri.com/forum/tele-home-depot/302667-problems-bending-flamed-maple-binding.html

Gearhead

I did some Maple bending doing a drop top four years ago. Used kettle steam as well as a heat gun.The gun makes it easier to point where you need heat but the steam gives better temperature control since you cannot burn the wood like with a gun. I think the pipe steamer is a useful tool if you do this more often than one drop top in four years. The key is not to think of water as the thing that allows bending, but heat.
You can actually feel the wood 'give' while bending. First put tension on the bend you want to make; the wood wants to spring back. Now, carefully heat the bend until you feel the springback fade away to about 25-50%. Do not heat until you feel no spring force anymore, rather bend some more so you feel more spring and then let the heat take away more than half of that.
Maybe good to mention in this regard, the Dutch East India ships were made out of oak planks over bent oak sections. The sections were 300-500mm wide and deep, essentially one oak tree per section half, cut into a square. They got the shape of the ship's section by attaching it root side to the keel, putting a large kettle on a larger fire underneath where they wanted to bend and then pull the top of the tree in with a tackle. They knew how to keep the wood from burning by using steam to keep the temperature down and could bend entire oak trees; surely we can bend flimsy little strips eh.

Manfred-Klose

the Dutch East India ships were made out of oak planks over bent oak sections

thats crazy!!!

i suppose bending some maple strips is alot easier than that.

i will try the kettle steam thing, once i decided to go ahead with it.

thanks gearhead

Gearhead

Manfred Klose wrote thats crazy!!!

So ye reckon sailing to Africa and founding Cape Town isn't?

Look here for an impression of the setup. Apparently bending a section took five hours, but I have also read several days...

Ian

steaming or a bending pipe is the way to go ,be patient and if need be redo .It does work