Bent plywood in 7 easy steps.

A tutorial on how to make a bent plywood chair leg. Created for Stanford d.school fellowship application, April 2009.

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Howto & Style

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• PlyVideo

[prusso37]

Thanks for the comments! A few responses:

@bradfordashoemaker: The plywood I used is 1/8" baltic birch, and has 3 plys. Of course, you could glue up individual plys, but starting with 3 is less work. The drawback is that the minimum bend radius is larger than with individual plys.

@franciscoferrario: The glue between the layers resists lateral slippage, so it's probably not necessary to "overbend" the mold, at least not by very much.

[BongSao1979]

@BongSao1979 Oh man. As soon as I wrote that I realized it was totally wrong to go with the grain. Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuudge!

[BongSao1979]

@BongSao1979 Also! I cut the strips WITH the grain of the plywood. Should I have gone perpendicular to it? (I am very new to wood working)

[BongSao1979]

Hello and thanks for this well made video. I have been unsuccesful in recreating what is demonstrated. I am using three ply birch (don't know if it's Baltic birch) and it begins to crack well before reaching a 90 degree bend. The radius of my mdf mold looks comparable to yours. I live in central Minnesota and the air is very dry this time of year but even after wetting the strips they still crack. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

[edmondmansourian]

great video and thanks for posting .

[DontFriendInviteMe]

AWESOME! Now all I need is a wood shop :o\

[balkanist]

What is the radius of curvature?

[steamlilly]

it's a waffle! Yummy! :D

[snowypetrel]

@MSergonis ?

[snowypetrel]

Love it, all that furniture is great, it's 60's and 00's at the same time.

[asdfgh2592]

i am making a similar bend using the same would and the same angle and radius but i have been trying to soak the wood and then individually bend each peace round but it just keeps snapping. how did you get it to bend without snapping or soaking? is it because you are bending them all at once?

[zappLD]

skillful and effective, but tricky: it wouldn't work with more complex shapes.

plywood should be bent from single plys, in order to allow higher bending and a correct edge grain section. your edge grain is weird: doubled in one way, single in the other one. (ok you could cut in alternate directions...) i

instead of clamps there should be negative and positive dies, so to properly distribute the stresses.

[b20002003]

their too many steps

[astrojams1]

thanks for posting this, peter. nice to see a familiar face and place.

[MrLeonard55]

Oh i see, you just need 1 leg for the chair. Pretty cool.

[Phrase]

I would assume that the plywood will only bend to that sort of radius when the face grain is going across the leg rather than along it. 1/8" ply would probably break if you tried to bend it to that radius the other way.

[15pinar]

thanks :) xx

[MSergonis]

Really awesome soup's on pin you got there.

[whittierlovesyou]

thanks, that was great

[MaxRokkatansky]

thumbs up from a german carpenter!

but when you do clamp the layers together i would add another piece of plywood without glue. so you can be sure that your clamps do not press in your workpiece!

keep up the good work !

[m6tleja]

Hey, nice and very clear video.

I have a question though, Why did you cut the plywood strips allways from the same side? As the finished piece shows, you get 2 layers with grain one way and 1 layer with crossgrain, was that intentional?

[NeckelYout]

I'm a designer currently working on a project to design some sort of product out of moulded wood. Can't wait to get sketching to see what i can come up with using this process, then i can start making what iv designed using this exciting method. Wish me luck!

[tofu4tortoise]

@bradfordashoemaker looks like 1/4

[ID10Ttatum]

That was great, Thanks for uploading, Cheers