Cold Bend Hardwood
Jan 16 2018 0 Comments
Posted on January 16th, 2018 by Gaston Monge-Grassi
Last year I found over the internet a company who managed to bend cold hardwood. In the past, wood bending was achieved only by steaming, but the company Pure Timber produces Cold-Bend™ hardwood, which lets you skip right to the clamping/bending step.
Will this be possible? Will this be real wood?
Cold-Bend hardwood undergoes extreme physical, longitudinal thermo-mechanical compression. There is no chemical treatment, or glues used in the process. It is solid hardwood that has been selected and milled to yield clear lumber. It is carefully controlled for moisture content. It is not modified in any way except for the extreme compression and the careful quality selection and moisture control required for its extreme bending qualities.
This raw material for your extreme wood bending applications has been used for Studio and Production Furniture, Architectural Fabrication, Boat Restoration, Wood Turning, Sculpture, and Musical Instrument Manufacturing. Cold-Bend hardwoods are engineered, solid, cold bendable hardwoods, that are uniquely suited to the most demanding extreme wood bendin projects. It is indistinguishable from clear, straight grained hardwood because that's what it is. It has just been subjected to carefully controlled, but intense, longitudinal thermo-mechanical compression.
The hardwood has been engineered to be extremely flexible (as long as it is moist). It is used in house at Pure Timber for fabrications, or shipped to you as planks wrapped in plastic to maintain its moisture for long periods of time (months to years) so that it can be kept on hand for current and future projects. It may be re-sawn and dimensioned with your usual tools except for power planers, and routers, which cause grain tear-out when applied in the direction of the grain. The moist wood can be abrasive planed, cross-grain planed, turned on a lathe, routed after it is dry, and sanded or sawn in any way, wet or dry. The moist wood can not be planed or molded in typical bench planers and production moulders because they tear and peal the grain. Once cold bent by hand (or with jigs, clamps and fixtures), it is dried to fix the shape.
Use Compressed Wood for extreme bending to a radius of curvature as small as 5 times the thickness of the plank without steam, without heat, without backing straps and without springback (1" thick board bent to a 5" radius - most coarse grained species) (fine grained species use 1:6 ratio). Tighter radiuses can be bent with oak and ash with some additional understanding of how the wood performs. While related to steam bending wood, bending with Cold-Bend hardwood allows for more extreme bent wood projects, and bending in any plane, even twists. And the wood is bent cold, you don't add steam. We've already steamed it, and compressed it, so when you cold-bend it by hand, it will stretch out to it's new shape, and dry in that shape.
I believe this will revolutionise different industries around the globe. There is a lot of information in their website including pricing. Pretty amazing!! I am sure David Haig, Michael Fortune and many of you will love this.
I wish a great start of the year to everyone and will see you around.
Cheers
Gaston
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