FLEXIBLE WOOD steam bending and joints

Joint bending: I worked off of the piece last week that was made of thin strips of wood that pulled apart at glue connections. rather than gluing, i notched connections at the same spots.

Effective joint connection: Wood will swell when it gets wet and shirnk again when it dries. Therefore, I wet the wood BEFORE I notched the places for the joints and then let the wood dry constructed together.




Using pop-up as a model for larger structure:














here are images of my pop-up book where the same slotted join connection is used. I could see the bend in the middle as a piece of fabric connected to the wood.




Steaming Wood - POP-up quality in the act of steaming/flattening/resteaming/bending

while I didn't have a steam box to hold in all the steam, it still worked by partially covering to keep most of the steam in.



once the wood was hot enough i was able to bend it and let it dry.




AFTER the wood was dry RE-STEAM the wood

able to flatten out again!









irepeated this process twice with success. it would be interesting to see how long the wood holds up by repeating this process over and over again. popping the wood up into curved shapes and then heating and flattening again.