138 Compressed Wood | Cold Bending Hardwoods

Wood in Flexy Straw Form

This week I have Chris Mroz, the president of PureTimber LLC as my guest to talk about compressed hardwoods and how they can be used for cold bending hardwoods into crazy shapes.  Literally tying wood into knots is something that Chris does for hours on end at trade shows to demonstrate the extreme capabilities of compressed wood.

The best metaphor I can think of is those flexy straws where an accordion like surface allows you to flex the straw back and forth.  By compressing the wood fibers we are no longer stretching the convex side of the curve (the limiting factor).  Instead the wood has that accordion fold and the convex part of the curve is just expanding back to its original length.  Chris talks about the size different from a board before and after compression that this illustrates perfectly what is happening in the process.   

Cold bending means that now we don't need heat to make the fibers pliable and stretchy.  We can just rely on the moisture in the cell walls to keep the flexible nature.  This isn't new tech but it is niche enough that you may never have heard or seen it.  Certainly the limits of the autoclave to compress the wood will mean that lengths and widths will never be able to compete with the wide world of wood.  But radical bending in an of itself is a pretty niche application.