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 does anyone know how luthiers bent their sides in the days before electricity and bottled propane gas????  Jody

Jody,

I know you live in Newburgh but power and natural gas should be out your way this year, hang in there!

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Kurt Thomas

"There's a first time for everything even if you do it by mistake."

OK, seriously I have seen someone use a pipe filled with charcoal, I think it may have been on Robbie O'brien's DVD on Steel String Construction, if he can do it with Kingsford I'm sure the old timers could have used hot coals or coal perhaps.

What's up with the question, are you thinking of trying something along this line?

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Kurt Thomas

"There's a first time for everything even if you do it by mistake."

Hot pipes and steam have never been hard to come by. You could probably bend fine around a fireplace chimney if it were stiff enough. I know some old Flemish harpsichords have the inside edges of the bent side charred to a coal, and were essentially thrown in to a fire to heat them. My mother-in-law's house is surrounded by Amish property, and they bend some pretty thick oak for chair backs by steaming them in a chamber before pressing them in to form, which is how a friend of mine still bends his harpsichord sides. There's oodles of ways to apply heat that aren't really that different, we just use a more convenient power supply now.

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Eschew obfuscation, espouse elucidation.

   sorry I missed your post  Kurt , I was in the outhouse !  LOL, actualy I will probably try the hot pipe and propane torch ...but I was curious as to how they did it , and I might try it.... Jody

  Thanks   David ,,, Jody

   HMMMMMM    I have a wood stove insert going in my living room right now... no stove pipe   but I wonder.......the top is hot enough to simmer water ( hotter if I stoke it) .........hmmmmmmm   lets see..... maybe if I.........

They boiled the sides and then bent them in forms.

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Hey Jody,

Did'nt Frank work at Martin, he would probably remember.

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Kurt Thomas

"There's a first time for everything even if you do it by mistake."

he did  . but i realy hate pestering him... I saw him  this weekend....he ( very reluctantly) sanded a back for me ,it would have been nice  to hang out in the shop again, but he was having a guitar workshop.. so he was busy ... jody

[QUOTE=KThomas]

OK, seriously I have seen someone use a pipe filled
with charcoal, I think it may have been on Robbie O'brien's DVD on Steel
String Construction, if he can do it with Kingsford I'm sure the old timers
could have used hot coals or coal perhaps.[/QUOTE]

Yes, Robbie O'Brien has bent a lot of sides that way. Maybe he will chime
in here. Not something you want to do indoors!

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Mike

"The Dude abides. I don't know about you but I take comfort in that. It's good knowin' he's out there. The Dude. Takin' 'er easy for all us sinners. Shoosh." The Stranger

Even Irving Sloane boiled the sides and bent them on a form.  He wasn't that long ago.  Truth is, if you were pretty good at it, you could heat an iron pipe in a fire, take it out and bend a side before reheating, but charcoal or coals from a fire would work fine.  

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Waddy

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 boiling the sides  sounds like too much moisture, in the wood, to deal with...if I can figure a way to " fixturize"  LOL   ( is that a word?)  my wood stove I will try it , I already have sides bent  for my first solo build .. but i want to try  a hybrid, with  some cypris I have ... and of course i have many mnay more guitars to build ..... Jody

You ask how they did it in the old days. This technique go's back hundreds of years maybe even thousand's. This technique was used in regular woodworking too. Irving Sloane was a master and I don't think his instruments ever suffered with this technique. You should pick up all his books they are very interesting...Mike

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I read somewhere that Stradivarius used the chimney of his stove

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I read a blog somewhere once from a guy who build using hand tools only.
He bent his sides on an old violin maker's spirit burner.

Claire

    thanks guys , Mike I am not saying sloane's technique is a bad one, I just see, in my situation , I dont  want to  need to allow the sides to sit for a long period of drying time, plus if I clamped them into a form,saturated ,with the materials available today for forms, I wonder how long the forms would last  . ... its just me ...I see a huge adantage in spritzing the wood and bending on  some type of iron... thanks Jody

In a GAL issue years ago there was an article by a guy who trained in France or Italy to become a violin maker ... part of the final exam was to bend a set of sides on a pipe/bar that had been heated in the fire only once, so you had to be quick, and good - no breaking allowed, or you failed !!!

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Tony Karol
www.karol-guitars.com
"let my passion .. fulfill yours"

Exactly what I was talking about.  Once it's hot, it'll hold the heat if the mass is sufficient.  My iron that I made, once heated to 350 or so, takes nearly an hour to go below 250*.  That's almost long enough for, even, me to bend a side.

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Waddy

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I bend my sides using an old North Sea oil pipe tapped into the upper mantle of Gamkonora volcano on Halmahera island.

Organic Side Bending, Sam? 

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Waddy

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Sound Clips of most of my guitars

 Sam .. that  might work for a "jumbo" guitar but......... LOL  Jody