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How do you carve solid wood board ?

I've done ten's of carving by gluing thin layers in a mold to create carved plywood. Those are extra strong but required to use quite a lot of glue and get the right thickness wood veneers. Would love to learn the solid board way.

edit: fined tuned my English today: seems carving means sculpting and not bending.

4 comments

The traditional methods of "carving" I know about are using an adze [1] and controlled burning [2].

[1] https://engineeringlearn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Adze...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/dwAu6RIQURo

In my chairs I just sculpt the back out of eight quarter with an angle grinder. More production focused wood workers are using multi-axis routers/cncs.

The english term for what you are referring to in bent lamination which is done by taking a piece of wood, slicing it to sections with a thin kerf blade, soaking in water, and then clamping to a form and gluing back together. This is how Russ Filbeck creates his classic presidential rocker.

Bending solid wood is something you do while it grows. See for example https://fullgrown.co.uk/, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Espalier or https://www.core77.com/posts/27263/Polands-Forgotten-Crooked...

I've seen people doing it with steam

And you can bend surprisingly thick wood with steam. I attended a demonstration where someone bent a maple 2 by 4 (1.5" x 3.5"). It took about 6 people and two tries (the first one splintered, probably not steamed enough).