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Home engineering / steam bending / curved walls
Curving Skirting Board
I built a house with curved walls. Introducing so many problems, including curved skirting board. But I got to build a steam box.
- Timber
- Oak, 18mm thick and 120mm tall. Oak steams well, which is most of the reason it is oak.
- Steam box
- A length of ventilation pipe, insulated, fed by a wallpaper steamer. Worked really well.
- Steam time
- Twenty to thirty minutes a length.
- Bend radius
- The tightest, over a 2.4m length the far end finishes about a metre off the line of the near end — so roughly a 2.7m radius.
- Springback
- None because I screwed it to the wall
- Fixing method
- Screwed into timber battens where there were battens, and into rawlplugs where the run was straight onto the wall.
What went wrong
Nothing, which was not the expected outcome.
What I would change
Nothing.
Steam box
A timber sauna
Heat and moisture have to soak into the long piece evenly, or it can split.
First fit
Offer it up before it gets too cold and stiffens up
Fixing
Fixing the curve
Finishing
Sanding in the workshop (removing marks from the steam)
Steam box
The homemade sauna
Bending
Persuasion by clamp
Fit
Onto the curved wall
The method
Heat provides flexibility.
Steam makes the timber briefly compliant. But the clock starts the moment it leaves the box, so the wall, tools and fixings all have to be ready and waiting.
The house
The drawings live in a git repo
This sits inside the wider house-build story, including the drawings and design work in the ChadHouse repo. Curved walls are really nice. And they also send you outside to build foil tubes.
