Cold-Bend™ hardwood (Compressed Wood, Compwood®) is available in 14 terperate hardwood species including White Ash, Beech, Red Oak, White Oak, Elm, Hickory, Black Locust, Hard Maple, Cherry and Walnut. This raw material for your Extreme Wood Bending™ applications has been used for Studio and Production Furniture, Architectural Fabrication, Boat Restoration, Wood Turning,Sculpture, and Instrument Manufacturing.
Cold-Bend™ hardwoods are engineered, solid, cold bendable hardwoods, that are uniquely suited to the most demanding Extreme Wood Bending™ projects. It is indistinguishable from clear, straight grained hardwood because that's what it is. It has just been subjected to carefully controlled, but intense, longitudinal thermo-mecanical compression (approximately 100,000 lbs). The hardwood has been engineered to be extremely flexible (as long as it is moist). It is shipped to you as planks wrapped in plastic to maintain it's moisture for long periods of time (months to years) so that it can be kept on hand for current and future projects. It may be re-sawn and dimensioned with your usual tools except for planers, and routers, which cause grain tear-out when applied in the direction of the grain. The moist wood can be abrasive planed, cross-grain planed, turned on a lathe, routed after it is dry, and sanded or sawn in any way. The moist wood can not be planed or molded in typical bench planers and production moulders.
Once cold bent by hand (or with jigs, clamps and fixtures), Cold-Bend™ hardwood is dried to fix the shape.
Use Compressed Wood for Extreme Wood Bending™ to a radius of curvature as small as 5 times the thickness of the plank without steam, without heat, without backing straps and without springback (1" thick board bent to a 5" radius - most species) (maple 1:6, beech 1:7).
Acrobat/Flash Articles:
Discovering Cold-Bend™ hardwoods by Tania Radda & Chris Mroz
Architectural Applications with Compressed Hardwoods
