Gibson OO- Side bending

I decided that today was the day to thickness and bend up a set of flamed maple sides.

Here they are resawn.

I had done some test cuts with my planes.  The antiques didn’t really do well.  I have a Lie Nielsen 4 1/2 with a 50 degree frog that did pretty well.  I really gave it a good sharpening.

Planed the sided cross grain.  Then went with the grain with a card scraper.  They ended up between .090″-.100″ thick.  Then I joined the face edges and cut to width.

This is my hot pipe bending set up.  Started with this, then realized that the bend in the waist was too tight for this pipe and had to improvise another one mid- bending.  I just sprayed the wood with water as I went as opposed to soaking.  Used the hot pipe and checked the shape with the plexiglass template sitting beside the pipe.

Luckily I had a smaller diameter aluminum pipe sitting around.  Rigged it up and put the torch in the back and bent the rest of the first side.  Then bent the other side on this pipe.

After  some fussing I had one set of sides bent up.  Now its sitting in the mold overnight.  Flamed maple is not as easy to bend as walnut, which was the only wood I had bent previously.  Came out ok though.