Woodworking Essentials: Bending & Shaping

Class Preview

Curve wood with confidence for fine furniture, home improvement or even boat building. Learn fundamental techniques for milling, laminating and steam-bending wood.

Intro to Bending & Shaping

Meet your instructor, Bill Thomas, and preview the three techniques you’ll learn for bending and shaping wood: milling, laminating and steam bending. Then, learn how to transfer a sketch onto your wood using graph paper, a grid and French curves; great for creating legs with decorative curves and more!

Milling Curves: Essentials

Start creating curved wood as Bill demonstrates milling the stem of a boat to illustrate his technique. Learn how to transfer a paper pattern onto a thin board to make a wood pattern, ensuring the curve is fair. Then, discover why you need to cut the stem into two pieces and glue them together for added strength.

Milling: Complex Curves

Make beautiful table legs with elegant curves as Bill takes you through the special considerations you’ll need to make when working with joinery. Pick up professional marking tips for notating mortises, outside edges and aprons, then see how to make two curved cuts on a single leg.

Laminating: Essentials

See how easily laminated wood bends and discover the adhesive you should use so that it doesn’t bend back! Bill walks you through creating a custom jig around which to bend your pieces, demonstrating how to glue up your strips and clamp them onto the jig. You’ll even learn how to design your jig to compensate for spring back.

Laminating: Complex Curves

Delve deeper into laminating curves as you learn how to build a shower rod that bends 90 degrees. Learn how to transfer your design onto a piece of scrap wood and then build a jig right on top of the pattern. Bill offers lots of tips for refining and adjusting the jig so that your wood doesn’t break. Then, bend your stock around the jig and let it set for an amazing, circular creation!

Steam Bending: Setup

Learn how to steam wood into shape, a great technique for curved pieces you want made out of a single board. Then, see how to build your own steam box of any size as Bill discusses the types of woods to use when steaming and what types to avoid.

Steam Bending: Essentials

Watch in amazement as Bill bends a 3/4″ white oak board into an elegant chair arm. You’ll learn how to build a jig on which to form your bent wood and pick up professional tips for steaming and handling hot wood. Then, see how to create traditional shaker boxes as Bill wraps a thin piece of steamed wood completely around a form, nailing it in place with brass tacks.