Wood Bending

Wood wants to run straight. Persuading it otherwise is one of the oldest disciplines in the trade and one of the least forgiving.

A curved plank like this one begins long before the bench. The board is selected for grain that will follow the arc rather than fight it; straight, even figure with no knots to crack under stress. The curve itself is achieved by patience, laminating thin plies over a form, or template-cutting from wider stock so the grain sweeps continuously through the radius, then milled, faired by hand, and dry-fit until the arc lands true against its neighbor with no gap a business card could find.

Curved work has no tolerance for approximation. A straight seam can hide a hair's error along its length; a curve reveals it immediately, because the eye reads an arc as a single unbroken line or not at all.