A *&^%$ Session, a/k/a One Step Forward, Twelve Steps Back

With a momentary semblance of normalcy returning to Shangri-la I was able to get all of the stock planed and dimensioned for the L’il Gragg chair and get set up for a steam bending afternoon.

Bending jigs in place and secured?  Check.

Steam box set up?  Check.

Plenty of distilled water on hand from the Dollar General?  Check.

Okay, let’s load up the steam box and get this stuff cooking!

Since the wood being used was not really “green” any more I gave it a little more cooking time, 40 minutes for the sticks instead of the typical 30 minutes as would be appropriate for the <1/2″ oak.

The first piece was almost fully bent when I heard the dispiriting cr-r-r-a-a-a-ck.  Okay, let me give it ten more minutes in the steam box and try it again.  Same cr-r-r-a-a-ack.  Ten more minutes.  Same result.  Ten more minutes.  Same result.  Ten more minutes.  Same result.

By this time I had a complete pile of broken parts.  All of them broke.  All twelve of them.  A 100% failure rate.  Had there been a microphone inside my head the sounds would have peeled paint.

What went wrong?  The wood was all harvested by me, by hand, from a newly felled tree.  The problem is that harvesting was a dozen years ago.  Some of that stock I’ve kept stacked in the basement of the barn and had worked it just fine as recently as 18 months ago.  Unfortunately, as I dove into Lake Gragg again a few years ago I moved a lot of the pieces up to the attic of the barn for future use.

Given the location of the workspace, directly underneath the asphalt paneled roof, it gets mighty hot up there in the summers.

I am surmising that I now have, in effect, a large stock of kiln dried chair pieces.  Even though the material was almost green air-dried wood when I brought it up, several summers worth of scorching heat in the attic resulted in bins full of transformed wood, with both the inter- and intra- molecular moisture having been driven out.

Now the task is to noodle the reconditioning of kiln dried wood for the purposes of steam bending, and that’s what I am going to undertake.

Stay tuned.