Bay Area Dave wrote:

I guess my "thin" strips of wood aren't thin enough! I just ran out to
the shop and tried to bend a piece of oak that is about 1/4" thick. No go.

I ran it through the planer (stuck to a thicker piece with carpet tape)
and promptly "blew" it up on the second pass. Took another strip and
got myself a 1/16+" piece to play with.

I ran screws into a sacrificial assembly table top and played around
with the strip. Seems like that will work. I suppose I can adopt the
same method with the MDF template? Just run some screws in at strategic
locations and bend the wood around them and trace? Am I on the right
track?

Sounds like it. I don't think I'd run (any more) thin strips
through the planer, though. I tend to favor the bandsaw for
ripping thin strips like this because I feel a little more in
control of what's going on. Usually I can rip a nice uniform
strip. If you want one part of the strip to be more "bendy" than
the rest, just plane or sand that part a tad thinner than the rest.

Your screw approach sounds workable. If you're going to do much
of this kind of work, you might want to glue a block to each end
of a strip so you can "freeze" the curve just by clamping the
ends down.

--
Morris Dovey
West Des Moines, Iowa USA
C links at http://www.iedu.com/c
Read my lips: The apple doesn't fall far from the tree.