Wood bending

Also called: steam bending, laminating, bent lamination, kerfing

Wood bending is curving solid wood to a shape, rather than cutting that curve from a thicker straight blank and wasting the offcuts. Modern furniture design mostly favours straight-sectioned stock, saving time and material by steam-bending or laminating only the parts that actually need to curve.

Steam bending

Steaming softens wood enough to bend it round a form, but not every timber takes to it equally well. Beech is rated heavy, hard, strong and highly resistant to shock, and the USDA (2021) noted that it "is highly suitable for steam bending." Kauri, by contrast, works well under hand tools, even though it dulls their edges somewhat, but it does not suit steam bending at all.

Laminating

Laminating builds a curve up from several glued layers of thin wood instead of steaming one thick piece into shape. As Fairham (1920) put it: "When extra strength is required, semicircular or circular work is built up out of four or five thicknesses of wood, and the method is called laminating." The curved framing for a kidney-shaped writing table, for one example, is built up the same way, from laminated thin layers. A member that is mostly straight but needs one curved end can instead be kerf-sawn there, with thin laminae, layers of wood, glued into the saw-cuts to fill and stiffen the bend; this kind of kerfing needs one consistent saw, an unvarying kerf depth, and evenly spaced cuts throughout. The same layered logic scales up to structural work: structural laminating grades exist specifically to sort lumber by the qualities needed for structural glued-laminated timber, usually called glulam.