yeah, it was a bit of heart lurcher when I heard a chunk tear out. first
time that's ever happened to me, so I was a bit nervous running the next
piece through, but it came out clean and more importantly, uneventfully!

dave

Morris Dovey wrote:

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.