Attempting steam bending of Iroko is like playing russian roulette with five bullets in the chamber. It will do it, with extremely careful material selection, soaking the stock for a week, decisive action when committing the bend, and a huge amount of luck. But the chances of material failure during the process are much much higher than usual.
All the caps and beadings were to be made of iroko, and you can see the finished egg shaped section of the caps in the picture above.
This defining detail took some time. As described there was a fair amount of experimentation to achieve the result.
The comparatively gentle bends around the cabin sides responded well, around the cockpit less so, with the coaming sides eventually being scarfed together from two attempted steam bends. This left the problem of the tightly curved coaming cap and quadrant for that raked and radiused after coaming.
Here’s the solution I came up with. Affectionately known as the armadillo, each curve is made of five scarfed pieces. tweaking the stops on each scarf enabled me to put the camber in too. This complex soultion was easier to do than I expected, but it still taught me an enormous amount.
Joining it all together required some joint invention. These ‘half lap bird beak’ joints resulted from the need for a mechanical joint with plenty of gluing area, but with the finished look of a mitre. I really enjoyed coming up with this solution. Explaining my idea to colleagues proved confusing, but the results spoke for themselves, and I repeated the whole process for the quadrants.
Seb vanden Bogaerde, Boatbuilder and Designer maker. Portfolio. 