Bending the Sides Part 1 - Day 9

DAY 9 - (HOURS 4.30, TOTAL TIME 24HRS)

- Now these hours are a little over, as I'm building a Mountain Dulcimer along side the guitar, it's a kit(And a present from Annie to me for my birthday!) so I'll give it it's own post when it's finished.

Bending the sides.

I was dreading this process, as the wood I have is one of the densest used for sides, but it's also thicker than it should be - not by much mind you, but if you can plane it down to 2mm, and mine is at 3mm, that's 50% extra workload already!

I've heard of the side bending process taking 30 minutes a side, even for a first timer. This was not the case for me. The wood wouldn't absorb water as it was too dense, so I was forced to use a cloth to wet it intermittently(which made the process way longer due to the cloth cooling it down every time) and use the iron to push a bit of steam through each time, eventually the wood would give, and I could bend it.

Well enough chat. Here is a few pics:

- the bending iron. You can get one online for around €150-€180. Quite expensive!

- the sides were soaked in the bath for 20minutes. A fruitless endeavour really, as they didn't absorb any water or become limber.

- this is actually after about 10-15minutes of bending. Granted it was my first attempt, but I could tell it was going to be a really slow process. I think at the start I was a bit afraid of applying the correct pressure, it's when you think the wood is about to break that the bending occurs. Keep the pressure on evenly, rocking the wood slightly to stop it burning on one point. The bending iron had 7 settings, I used the 5th for this wood.

- I was catching the hang of it, this is at about 30 minutes.

- I think this was around 2 hours. A crack appeared down the grain very early in the bending process. It was obviously a weak spot as not a lot of pressure was being applied at the time. I'll show all this and the repair work in a later post.

- the second side came on a lot faster, I thought maybe after 4hours in the bath the wood would be as supple as those yokes Rolph Harris uses, but no, it wasn't. It was down to me being familiar with the bending iron. I never practised on scrap wood with this tool - foolish really. i would strongly recommend doing so, especially if you've got nice wood, or no other wood to use if you break the piece you're working on.

- I left the sides at this for the day. the wood had suffered enough!

- I filled in the small hole in the routing channel of the rosette using two pieces of wood that had been cut out.

- it was a crude job, that will require sanding and a glue/wood paste to fill in the rest, but it makes the hole a lot smaller.

- I had to make two wedges as well...

- as the ends of the mould were not aligning properly.

I called it a long day after this.