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Discover Extreme Wood Bending

Pure Timber is primarily a manufacturer of custom bent wood curved parts, components and fabrications and also sells engineered Cold-Bend hardwood for your own wood bending needs.

Cold-Bend™ hardwood (Compressed Wood, Compwood®) is most commonly compressed in the well known North American hardwoods: Ash, Red Oak, White Oak, Walnut, Elm and Maple. It is also sometimes available in most of the other temperate hardwood species for a total of 20 species that we compress. These other species include Beech, Elm, Hickory, Pecan, Black Locust,  Honey Locust, Sassafras, Sycamore, Kentucky Coffee Tree, Hackberry, Red Gum, Live Oak, Osage Orange, Mullberry and Persimon. Wood compression does not work on imported lumber, kiln dried lumber, or any of the softwoods (coniferous species).

This raw material for your Extreme Wood Bending™ applications has been used for Studio and Production Furniture,  Architectural Fabrication, Boat Restoration, Wood Turning, Sculpture, and Musical Instrument Manufacturing. Cold-Bend™ hardwoods are engineered, solid, cold bendable hardwoods, that are uniquely suited to the most demanding Extreme Wood Bending™ projects. It is indistinguishable from clear, straight grained hardwood because that's what it is. It has just been subjected to carefully controlled, but intense, longitudinal thermo-mechanical compression.

The hardwood has been engineered to be extremely flexible (as long as it is moist). It is used in house at Pure Timber for fabrications, or shipped to you as planks wrapped in plastic to maintain its moisture for long periods of time (months to years) so that it can be kept on hand for current and future projects. It may be re-sawn and dimensioned with your usual tools except for power planers, and routers, which cause grain tear-out when applied in the direction of the grain. The moist wood can be abrasive planed, cross-grain planed, turned on a lathe, routed after it is dry, and sanded or sawn in any way, wet or dry. The moist wood can not be planed or molded in typical bench planers and production moulders because they tear and peal the grain. Once cold bent by hand (or with jigs, clamps and fixtures), Cold-Bend™ hardwood is dried to fix the shape. 

Use Compressed Wood for Extreme Wood Bending™ to a radius of curvature as small as 5 times the thickness of the plank without steam, without heat, without backing straps and without springback (1" thick board bent to a 5" radius - most coarse grained species) (fine grained species use 1:6 ratio).  Tighter radiuses can be bent with oak and ash with some additional understanding of how the wood performs. While related to steam bending wood, bending with Cold-Bend hardwood allows for more extreme bent wood projects, and bending in any plane, even twists. And the wood is bent cold, you don't add steam. We've already steamed it, and compressed it, so when you cold-bend it by hand, it will stretch out to it's new shape, and dry in that shape. There are six more pages in this section. See the tabs under "Discover"

 Pure Timber Wood Bending


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