How to Bend Wood Flooring with Steam

I have been working with wood floors for over 35 years now. Many of the tricks of the trade I have learned during that time are the result of necessity rather than innovation.

The job that got me to learn how to bend wood with steam was a brownstone in Georgetown in Washington, DC. Many brownstones in the Georgetown area have a circular tower on one of the front corners.

The craftsmen who built these beautiful homes liked to install borders in the flooring to add to the charm and elegance of these homes. They took pride in what they did.

One of the things they did was use flooring that resembled yardsticks. These pieces were made in a cabinet shop and then burlap was glued to the bottom to keep them all together. Try to imagine carpeting with a jute backing with yardsticks glued to it instead of carpeting. They would bring the roll of wood flooring to the job site, roll it out and cut it to fit. They then face nailed it with small brads so that the nails made a pattern. There was no tongue and groove.

The job required replacing some of the border in the hallway and in the kitchen which was in the round tower on the first floor. Since the flooring was so old getting the right wood to repair it was a challenge. I found an old dresser and table which was made of wood of about the same age. I disassembled them and cut the wood to the needed dimensions to match the floor. This provided the quarter sawn white oak for the floor. I found a couple of old Honduras mahogany at a salvage place for the mahogany I needed and cut that to dimension as well.

In the kitchen there was an old radiator right under the window which had evidently leaked over the years and the flooring had turned black. It was somewhat dry rotted as well. My job was to repair the border under the radiator so that it looked like the original.

The contractor removed the radiator so I could work on the flooring. Imagine trying to bend a yardstick the wrong way. That is what I had to do with the flooring. I started reading about how wood was steamed. The first thing I learned was that quarter sawn wood was required to bend wood.

Quarter sawn wood was an old way of cutting wood. First growth trees were large in diameter. These are the trees that were growing when Columbus came. Because ot this large diameter and how plentiful the trees were the sawmills would cut the wood in a very wasteful way called quarter-sawing.

Imagine the end of the log. They would first cut the log in half so that there were two semicircles on the end of the log. They would then cut these these two semicircles in half so the ends would look like pieces of a pie. They literally cut the wood into quarters thus the name. They would then turn the wood .so the v side was pointing down and then cut the wood from the center to the outside of the log on the radius. This made it so that the grain of the wood was vertical to the surface of the boards. When you see wood where the grain looks like the lines of a music staff rather than like plywood you are looking at quarter sawn wood. This is the type of wood needed for steaming.

I first cut the wood to dimension on my table saw so that the wood was quarter sawn. I then made a box out of an old aluminum gutter. After placing the wood I wanted to bend in the box I then fired up the tea kettle on the kitchen stove and let the steam fill the box.

Prior to starting to steam the wood i built a jig using nails and a sheet of plywood. After the wood was steamed and pliable I bent the wood into the jig so that it was bent to the curve I needed. I then let it dry in that position. I was amazed at how flexible the wood was. It is in someways like cooking spaghetti.

Once the wood was dry and I removed it from the jig it retained the curve. It was pretty neat. I then took it to the job and cut the bent pieces to length to do the repair. The wood didn't seem to match the old wood as much as i would have liked so I learned a new trick. I stained the wood antique brown. After the stain was dry I sanded most of it off but left a little of it in the wood. This made the wood match almost perfectly.

There is a lot of satisfaction in taking on a challenge and completing it successfully like I did with this project.