Bending over backwards

Finally, I've gotten something done. The steam box is complete an on line. This piece of equipment is for steaming the wood so that I can bend it into position. It was actually done on Wednesday but I only just got a chance to hook it up and test it today. It's 12 ft long and made out of white cedar that I reclaimed from some extra sections of fence I had laying around. Some of you may recall the lobster steamer I made last summer out of the same stuff. It's fairly knotty stuff and a good thing too otherwise I'd be ripping down my fence for planking. Knotty or not, it serves well for steam since it's rot resistant and is a fair insulator. The box has a door on one end and is just capped on the other. There are two steam inlets which are just some 1/2 in copper I sweated to fit and it connects to the boiler with the same heater hose everything else does.

For those of you who weren't in the NE this past week, it was extremely cold (for around here anyway) and my new hot well (see previous post for details) froze solid, but didn't crack or pop any fittings, so I'm viewing it as an unqualified success. I also fixed the radiator for heating the boat shed. I used a putty called FastSteel and it seemed to so the trick. Also, it cures in about and hour. I highly recommend it.

So I put 5 gal of water in the boiler this afternoon and got up some steam and opened the valves. The first thing is that the radiator exceedes my expectations. I couldn't get more than 5 lbs no matter how much wood I put in the firebox and the radiator turned it all back to water. It was about 90 deg F in the barn at one point.

I then tried the steam box. As I mentioned before, all of the oak that I have is kiln dried and very stiff and I'm not sure how it's going to work out. So I tried a scrap of 1X1 just to see. It was about 4 ft long. I cooked it for about an hour. When I took it out is seemed fairly flexible, but I wanted to see what sort of radius it would take. It wasn't much, but there was a lot that I did improperly (like leave the board rough instead of finished) so it wasn't a fair test. It bent about 30 deg before letting go so it worked fairly well. I had hoped to try to see it it would take a twist, but it snapped in half during the bend test so I just threw the whole thing in the boiler. To the left is a pretty neat pic of the inside of the steam box. It's shut down in this pic. The wisps of steam you see are just the cold air getting in. If you look in while it's running you can't see more than about 6 in. inside.

Well, the circulating hot water de-iced the hot well and now I have heat in the barn again so we should see a lot of progress now.