hello my name is Benjamin burner today we're going to steam Bend kiln dried wood now in my last video I tempted this and it didn't go so well a lot of people say that kiln dried wood can't be bent at all well it does being treated it's very difficult I have had some success after adjusting several things I couldn't find any wood that wasn't kiln dried so I really just had to work with what I had and keep flying different things seems to be working step one we've got some plastic sheeting here I'm going to cut a strip out of this so that I can wrap it around the piece of wood all right I've got a strip of my two mil plastic sheeting this is just like a drop cloth that I got at Home Depot I'm gonna go ahead and get my piece of wood and wrap it in this so I make the decision to soak the wood that I'm steam sending and I know about lignin and the theories about why smoking doesn't help and why you can't bend kiln-dried wood well like I said I couldn't really find anything else and rather than just give up I figured I might as well try it I don't know it's the same thing but something I'm doing is allowing me to successfully bend this wood I made this soaking tub just out of some scrap two-by-fours things like that and then lined it with the same plastic that I'm using to steam them the wood and that seems to work really well I'm using Hickory here a fairly straight range piece of Hickory Hickory seems to bend better than most of the types of wood that I've tried this has been soaking for three or four days now and even with that time the water is only really penetrated just a small amount into this wood that's okay though because the surface of the wood is what experiences the most stress when you're bending it and that's the first part to get soaked in the water so without let's go ahead and Bend this guy okay here's my piece of hickory let's go ahead and wrap it in plastic this is just a regular household stapler I had lying around can wrap it like this fold this over several times all right so here's my 1500 watt drywall steamer which is working really well at producing a lot of steam I cut the attachment off here I'm just going to put this in here and wrap it in duct tape okay we're ready to go I made a funnel out of a milk carton always nice to reuse things and I have some hot water that I've been boiling on the stove I find it if I pour boiling water in here it starts to process up a lot faster otherwise this thing takes quite a while to heat up it goes without saying at this point that there's more than a little bit of risk of burning the crap out of yourself hopefully that goes without saying curtly safer to add cold water or just warm water instead of really hot water as always you kind of have to evaluate your own risk tolerance and certainly not a safety expert all right so I went ahead and plug that in and you can hear it already starting to boil which is great producing steam now the next thing that I've found in steam venting really dry our kiln dried wood is that it takes a lot more speed time so the recommendation I found online was one hour per inch of thickness and with kiln dried wood I've been doubling tripling even quadrupling that without any problems so it seems like you can steam it for 3-4 hours and not have any problem and I found that that works better I get better results as I extend the beam bending time so it's in here now it's starting to steam and we'll just leave it here for for quite a few hours now the wallpaper steamer here holds I think a little over a gallon so I will have to check the level of the water and refill it several times throughout this process each time I refill it I boil the water on the stove to refill it if I don't do that then it cools everything off and takes you know 15 20 minutes to reheat and during that time it's not getting steamed so I always refill it with boiling water as noted before there are obvious safety risks with that I'm just dude trying this in his garage so don't go yell at me if you're dumb and you burn yourself so it's been steaming for a good long time and you can tell it's kind of the bag is inflating with steam a little bit using an infrared thermometer can just check the temperatures right here where I'm going to bend it and I find that they're all right around 215 in Fahrenheit so that's great now I think the most important thing when bending wood is the compression straps that I built that seems to have made the biggest difference because they went through several iterations of this these are water heater straps that I bought at a hardware store and I have two of them you have to compress the outside bend so this strap right here wraps around and compresses the outside of this spend and this strap right here wraps around and compresses the outside of this Bend like this and they both grab the ends of the board to compress it like that now I've built these guys right here and these just kind of knot onto the end of the board and squeeze it on on both ends okay so the straps are on hopefully you can kind of see how they work as I bend this around here this strap is going to place compression on this outside edge as it bends to keep it from tearing apart and the same thing is happening over on this side now I want to get as much compression on here as I can without actually breaking these straps or bending them or something like that which has proved to be pretty easy to do actually so finding that balance is pretty critical I find it works well just to kind of tighten this up a bit get a little snug how's that bended around of course it will get tighter and tighter or rather it will compress the wood more now I have a couple clamps handy with this just roughly one inch square piece I haven't actually had to clamp it down to get the bends I just slide this in place unlock it but I do all the bending just by pulling it one of the nice things about plastic is you can kind of maintain the steam heat the entire time you're bending it just checking to make sure that looks good I don't think we have any any brakes or anything just going to let this sit here let it slowly cool off I'm actually going to keep it in the bag I don't want it to dry up and cool off too quickly and then in an hour or so I can come back and take rest of this stuff off by then it should be pretty cool right so I just had plenty of time to cool nice and cool there we can go ahead and take it out of the plastic and see how we did as you can see it's a pretty extreme Bend and it looks pretty good there's just a little bit of a crack here a little bit of a crack here on the outside of those places but they're not deep at all I don't think they're going to affect the structure of it in any way but yes it still seems to Bend pretty well all right guys thanks for watching if you like this it'd mean a lot to me if you commented on it liked it subscribe I really appreciate all of the things that motivates me to do more of these things also stay tuned because I am really committed to building this crib for my kid and I will hopefully find the motivation to post more videos - the next step is to start putting all these pieces together so you can start seeing how well they'll fit into a crib thanks again you guys keep building