Woods Good For Bent Lamination

Standard wood glue is not the best choice for bent laminations.

Woods good for bent lamination.

If you ve ever glued two pieces of wood together face to face you ve essentially created a laminate. It s messy but rewarding to see a gracefully bent piece of wood emerge from a glue encrusted form. A laminate is simply anything made up of two or more layers of material. What you need to use for bent wood lamination is 1 8 bending poplar plywood that comes in either long or short grain.

Quite a while back i did a series of glue tests on bent laminations. Bent lamination just introduces the element of curving the laminate. So your best bet with heavilyt curved parts is to either steam bed the material to shape or do a bent lamination. It also cleans up easily with water.

Lamination is different than veneering. If your radii is tight you can use 1 16 wisa italian bending plywood. Epoxy is also a good choice for bent laminations but it costs almost twice as much as urea formaldehyde. The concept is actually pretty simple.

The more seams you have the less chance for springback. I recommend unibond 800. Pictured left you can see a closeup of one of the rockers on my maloof inspired rocker. Apply a laminate or glue to the wood.

These sheets come in 4 x 8. The technique to produce the laminate is called lamination. It s a urea formaldehyde glue with three shades of powdered catalyst to better match the wood you re using. This is a perfect example of a situation where bent lamination is a good choice.

Bent lamination is a process of bending thin strips of wood using lots of glue and lots of clamps.