Classic Medeot Garden Furniture
25 November 2008
“Bend THIS, Beckham!”
As a cabinetmaker I tend to look at wooden furniture a bit more carefully than what would otherwise be the case. I look at the design, of course, but also how it is made, because technique is often more important than design. Some years back I visited a shop in San Diego that featured a lot of pottery, both indoor and out. They had a wonderful outdoor display area that led to the shop itself, complete with a curved staircase that led to the shop. Someone had designed and installed a beautiful curved wooden railing that was just a wonderful design, really, but it was made of laminated wood, and the builder had not thought to use waterproof glue, so it was now beginning to delaminate.
I thought about that when I came across this lovely garden furniture from Medeot. The way they built it completely eliminates that problem, but before I get to that I did want to talk for a moment about the wood they chose for their line of furniture. It looks like teak, and is said to be every bit as resistant to the weather as teak, but it is, in fact, false acacia, a wood they have chosen because unlike the more exotic woods, many of which face extinction, it is harvested and reforested carefully. So it can be used without fear of doing more harm to an already fragile planet.
But what most caught my eye were the designs themselves and the wonderful way Medeot worked curves into everything they made. More than that, they used the absolute best method for curves that are to be used outdoors. They did not laminate them or band-saw them. They bent the wood for them, and therein lies a tale.
Bending wood is a technique that has always fascinated me as a woodworker because of the process involved. In part, it is actually simpler than it seems, because you simply put it in a box, fill it with steam for a few hours, then out comes the wood, and you can—by moving quite smartly—bend it into the desired shape. More se
vere bends cause more severe problems, but a curve like those used in this line of furniture are, they say, pretty straight forward, after you allow for spring back. Bent wood always comes back a bit to its original shape, so you have to over-bend it, as it were. How much over-bend, you ask. To which I reply, you’re asking the wrong person!
But there is a practical reason for bending wood in the first place, which is why I entered into this discussion. It makes the finished project much stronger. All of us know wood has a grain, but unless you really get into making sawdust, you may not know that wood will tend to break along those grain lines. The chaise lounge at the top of this blog is a case in point. It is possible to band-saw a curve like that, but if you were to do so, it would be very weak. Think of a piece of wood as a lined sheet of paper, with the lines representing the grain. A piece of wood that size has a fair am
ount of strength, but if I were to slice off, say, two inches, it would be correspondingly weaker, and the longer the piece were, the more prone it would be to breaking. And let us suppose, further, that you needed a piece two inches by eleven. If you did that on our sheet of paper, you would have the lines every five-eights of an inch. If that were wood with the grain running side-ways like that, the piece would be extremely weak. It would be better to have a piece in which the grain (or paper lines) ran up and down instead of sideways.
But suppose you decided to swing an arc with your two-inch slice of wood. Now, no matter how you orientate the grain, you are guaranteed having grain lines that will run across the strip, thereby weakening it. But if I were to find a piece of wood with the grain line running up and down, sliced off a piece, and then bent it into the shape I want, the grain lines would then run the full length of the piece, making it considerably stronger.
So that, at much too great a length, I fear, is why the better furniture makers bend wood instead of band-sawing it, which is the quicker and cheaper method, because time is always money. But bad technique trumps good design, which is why honorable craftsmen use time-honored methods for doing the job right. I guess the short-hand way of stating this is to say that the reason Medeot bends wood is because they refuse to cut corners!
Joseph
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