Kate wrote:

Boy Larry, I sure like it.
I've watched them bend wood on TV, they always make it look so easy IF you
have the thousands and thousands of dollars of equipment that they have.
The design is beautiful in its simplicity. How long did it take you to
form the arches?
I suppose I could look it up, but what is Kerf bending?
Is there even an issue with the wood just snapping at the bend?

Very interesting. Now all you need is a good Jersey cow and a milk bucket



Kate,

I can look out my window and see the cows. I haven't yet tried using the
stool for milking. I have to turn a bucket on my lathe, first! :-)

The equipment for steam bending is not very expensive. The steam box we
built and used required a full sheet of plywood. The boiler was an old
canning kettle. Total material cost less than $100.

The bending straps are available from Veritas
http://www.leevalley.com/wood/page.a...73&cat=1,45866
or you can make your own. In either case, the cost is not high.

So for say $200 you can have all of the steam-bending equipment to last you
many years. You'll need a good pair of gloves!

We, the class of eight students, made all of the forms for bending and
drying the legs and seat supports as well as the router jigs for setting
the legs into the seat. We also made the forms for the seat. This all took
us less than a day.

The steam-bending process took another day or day-and-a-half, but a lot of
this time was waiting for the wood to cool on the forms before the next one
could be done. Each pair of legs probably took an hour to steam, two
minutes to bend, 30 minutes to cool on the bending form, 24 hours to dry
and 5 minutes to saw the blank into two legs.

Then the legs were copy-routed to a template.

Of course the steamer was large enough to do all eight leg pairs at the same
time with room to spare, so there was little overhead in terms of time to
steam the second and subsequent leg pairs.

Kerf-bending is the process of sawing most of the way through a piece of
wood to make it flexible. We did this with the core of the seat and then
laminated to conceal the kerfs.

Cheers,

Larry