Steam Bending Wood

Description

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Dave Canterbury, David Canterbury, The Pathfinder School,Bush Craft ,Survival skills, Historical Lore, Primitive Skills, Archery, Hunting, Trapping, Fishing, Navigation, Knives, Axes, Fire, Water, Shelter, Search and Rescue

Tags: Bushcraft,Survival,David Canterbury,Dave Canterbury,Pathfinder,The Pathfinder School,Archery,Hunting,Fishing,Camping,Primitive Skills,Fire,Water,Shelter,Navigation,First Aid,Search and Rescue,Signaling,Prepper,Preparedness,Self Reliance,Survivability,The 10 C's,Knives,Axes,Saws,Bow Drill,Ferrocerium Rod,Ferro Rod,Tarp,Hammock,Canteen,Cooking,Longhunter,Trapping

Video Transcription

morning guys I'm Dave Canterbury with the Pathfinder school what we're going to do today is we're going to do a small project to make the outside portion of an OG style pack frame and to do that we're going to use a technique called steam bending or heat bending steam and heat bending of wood is a very ancient skill it's one that everyone should understand because it allows you to manipulate material from the National environment to shapes that you want it not only to straight and arrows or to put reflex Dee flex and bow limbs but also to make the structural material for boats as well as things like this pack frame are going to do today stay with me we'd start stuck it's been soaking in water quite a while and I'm going to use steam to help me bend a stick as well but right now just trying to stretch the fibers out while they're wet get it somewhat pliable and I'm just using this tree as a form give it a gentle curve eventually we're going to want to stick to been a long ways because we're going to try to make a pact frame with this so we've got to have a bent hoop here about six feet in length Steam's going to help us with that here just a little while it doesn't hurt anything to continue to break this over your knee a little bit that time while you're waiting on your water to heat up and get that steam and where we can get this thing to bend now the better off we're going to be when you get ready to bend it in half we don't want we don't want this thing breaking internally on the underside and we don't want to delaminate it either on the outside so it's a time-consuming process especially in the winter time to form wood with heat or with moisture but once you get it to where you need it and it dries out it will stay that way okay so what I've done here is I've just taken a loop of line and I've put just a slipping type loop on this side and then I have taken the other side that line and running through that loop and that's going to be basically a tensioning loop I'm going to take the other side of this string and I'm going to bend this down like this put this loop right here then I can use this portion here to tension it down now I could notch these sticks if I wanted to but I don't think that's going to be a necessity if I notch them out on the end it wouldn't be a big deal but they're what enough right now it's not going to make it difference so I'm just pulling down slowly on that tensioning loop to slowly bend it now what I'm going to do is I'm not applying a windlass yet what I'm going to do is I'm going to put just a trucker's hitch style knotting this to hold it and now I'm going to begin steaming the hook portion of this to help it Bend even more now as this water begins to boil down here I've wrapped my watch coat over the top of my tripod just in an effort to trap a little bit more that heat and steam and I'm just lowering it down raising it up as I can around the flames obviously we don't want to catch it on fire now I'm going to take my hoop stick it in here that's close to the steam as I can get it just like this I don't want it in the fire I want it in the steam so that it will impregnate the wood with hot water and make it Bend easier as I go I'm continually tightening this pro this trucker's hitch loop I'm continuously tightening it as I go while this is in the bending process and I just go a couple inches out of time and I tie it off again and go back into the steam again and I can adjust what areas Bend on this thing a little bit by how I steam it and where i steam it if my arc starts to get off kilter a little bit which it's going to anyway naturally on you because your stick is going to go from large to small obviously you're not going to get a 1 diameter stick across a 6-foot length very easy so you have to just play with that as well having these Forks on this tripod pretty much allows me hands-free with this operation at certain times

Oh hot chocolate now remember that as you steam this stuff you also dry it so you're going to have to just try to bend the areas that you're steaming and all I'm doing now is I'm trying to get a little bit more of a gentle curve to this instead of a curve right here in the center I'm trying to curve it over just a little bit here and I'm going to curve it over a little bit more on the other side here as well drop that curve down just a little bit to give myself a little bit more of an even arc right here you may get yourself to the point during this process where you've got to add a little bit more water to your pot set your project aside for a few minutes to create more steam once that water starts to boil down just take your time with it you don't need to be in a hurry right Rufus got all day no me buddy got all day no way get on they don't hold kisses yuck the further your water gets down this container further your steam is from your piece and the more heat you're getting in there to actually dry the wood out so you want to keep a pretty good level of boiling water in there if you can and just keep close eye on that fire and keep it tended because that's going to be the key to getting this thing to bend without breaking we've made quite a bit of progress already I want to show you something about this loop because the way we're using this loop we can actually rotate it around once it gets short we can rotate it around because we use that trucker's hitch type tensioning loop we can just slide that loop around to get more drawdown and that's what we've done and now we're getting to the point where we've got it within probably six or seven inches of what we want to be when we're done I've got one spot here sometimes you just got really torque on that stuff a little bit once you get heated up get dependent now I'm getting exactly what I want and I'm about you know I can bend that thing to where I need it now easy enough and tighten the string up and let it sit and dry you can see what the pin looks like I'll show you a wider of that in a minute but what I was talking about with this tightening loop is what I want to show you real fast with this trucker's hitch type loop in here I can adjust this around to gain some pull on this thing and this thing doesn't need to be any closer together then it's going to be this thing doesn't need to be any closer together here really than the small on my back but once I get that thing pretty leveled out which it is now I'm going to tie it off on time and I'm probably going to put a safety half-inch and this one to make sure it doesn't come undone and then I'm going to heat it up one more time real quick just to make sure everything stays where I want it to stay in and then I want to look at one of my frames at now now it's a little bit closer than I need it but that's okay there's nothing broken except a little bit of bark peeling off which that's okay too because I'm going to end up peeling the bark completely off of this one I'm done but I want to let it dry with the bark on it so now I have the beginnings of my pack frame here it's just the right width right there in between my shoulders if I go backwards like this I'm good to go and that's the way I want it just like that so if I chicken wing back it's not going to get in my way that's just about perfect so now I've just turned this hoop upside down these Forks with the bend down just in the fire where it's uncomfortable for me to put my hand not close enough that it's going to burn the wood and I can adjust that just by moving the tripod a little bit back and forth and that will solidify that forming of the wood and keep it in that shape once it dries out okay so one thing that we need to understand material-wise real quick that I may not have covered really well in this video is that we're using a piece of about 3/4 inch diameter red bud and red buds a pretty flexible tree in the summertime although you probably wouldn't get away with bending something this diameter double over like this even in the summer time but in the winter time the ability to be able to heat bend or steam bend wood like this becomes even more critical because there's not as much SAP flowing through the wood and it's more brittle to begin with so I just wanted to cover the materials that were using in the type of wood that I'm using today because red buds a very prolific Bush type tree all over the Eastern woodlands and it's very good for things like this folks I appreciate joining me here today for this video on how to steam bend wood I think this is a very traditional important primitive skill that we should understand to help us take advantage of the resources available to us to make the things that we may need I appreciate your views I appreciate your support I thank you for anything to do for our school for our family for our business all of our sponsors instructors affiliates and Friends and I'll be back with another video as soon as I can [Music]