Steambending wood is like being goalkeeper for a rubbish football team. Long periods of boredom punctuated by a few seconds of frenetic activity, when you can get everything right and still somehow lose.

Despite that, it’s something I look forward to and usually have a session once a month to furnish me with enough parts for my chairs. I’ll try to calmly explain how it all works, but if a note of panic sets in then, well, that’s how it goes…

Last week I explained that I use air dried timber for bending - the moisture content needs to be fairly high for it to bend easily. It’s for this reason that I keep my bending stock outdoors, under cover. It’s bandsawn to roughly the right dimensions (there’s a lot of shaping to follow, no need to be precise) then stacked up next to my steambox.

Steambox - Courtesy of Dr Who props department, 1978.

My steambox is an insulated plywood contraption hooked up to a wallpaper steamer. I managed to find a steamer that gives off steam for a couple of hours, which is (not coincidentally) as long as I can go without a cup of tea. Once it’s built up a head of steam and the interior of the box is over 100 degrees, I’ll pop in the first bit of wood. This will take 25 minutes to become flexible. Every five minutes I’ll stick another one in and set a timer. Things will shortly get a bit hectic.

The first timer goes off and it’s a sudden burst of activity. I’ll whip the first piece of wood out of the box, replace it with a fresh one and head back in to the shed to my bending station. This bench is over-engineered to almost Victorian standards - I don’t want anything to move other than the piece of wood I’m trying to tame! The wood is swiftly fitted into a strap. This puts it under compression as it bends, which helps prevent failure. The long handles also assist with pulling it into shape.

On the back of the bench you can see various “forms” made of ply. I’ll pull the wood tight round one of these, then wedge it into place. The wood cools pretty quickly - after 60 seconds it’ll be impossible to persuade it any further. After a couple of minutes it will have almost set, holding the shape of the form. I’ll tie the ends then knock the wedges out. There’s a warm, biscuity smell of ash in the shed by now. The smell of success, hopefully.

Sometimes not, though. If the grain isn’t dead straight, there’ll be a point of failure and the wood will splinter apart. My first few sessions bending wood were more notable for inventing swearwords than making chair parts. I’ve since learned to read the wood and discard any that won’t make it - before they go into the steambox.

I’ll usually make a variety of parts each session - arms, bows, crests. These will be hung to dry in my workshop for at least a week. It’s good to know that I’ve a decent amount of stock ready, and if I’m making a set of chairs I need to choose closely matching parts. There were only a couple of failures this time round, for which no documentary evidence exists…other than what happened after they were turned into kindling.