while I don’t build wooden boards at the moment ( mebbe sometime in the future) , I do build wooden boats… which includes bending lots of hardwood, so I might be able to shed some light on the subject.
The boards you see on that site are built using strips of veneer bent around polystyrene foam, not one big piece bent around the whole board, done that way so that you don’t get any major compound curves, though you do have to bend 'em around tight radii here and there, rails and such. The reasons you don’t see hardwood used for this? Weight is one consideration, plus the denser grain of something like oak won’t necessarily take up resin as balsa, cedar and the like will.
Now, bending the veneer - oak, which I use a lot of, is gonna be kinda stiff. Bending it around the rails - well, either it’s gonna crack or it’s gonna be stiff enough that it crushes foam rather than bending around it. You can heat up oak with steam to get it to bend very nicely indeed, but as you might guess a very hot, very wet veneer is gonna be something you don’t want to squash into foam. Besides which, you need to get it formed before it cools off or dries out ( otherwise it won’t bend) , which isn’t gonna work out real well with a vac bag setup. When we do a tight curve veneer lamination in the boat biz, we do it around a form or around something relatively hard like heavy timber or steel. Bending bigger stuff is a pretty interesting - a very good steam-bending FAQ here ( http://www.wcha.org/tidbits/steamfaq.html ) , similar to the setup and techniques I use.
If you were to try steam bending stiffer woods around, say, a board that had been lightly glassed ( 4 oz cloth or less ) I’d expect the heat to make delam problems or soften the resin enough that the board would be awfully lumpy or both. Heavier glassing might take care of it, but then you’d wind up with a very heavy board.
However, there is a way to sort of get it to work with hardwoods. On areas like the deck and bottom, which are relatively flat surfaces, use the hardwood veneer strips laid in where it doesn’t have to be bent much, no more than the gentle front to back bend of the deck and bottom rocker. Then you can use lighter, more easily bent woods for those difficult spots like the rails. If you wanted to get fancy… http://www.artmarquetry.com/ will give you some ideas.
hope that’s of use
doc…
