: Wow, you are tenacious! "every couple of weeks".

: Are the strips you're using northern white cedar?

: Water alone does nothing. Don't confuse wet "green"
: wood's bending properties with dried wood.

: Water is a vehicle for heat transfer. Heat is what facilitates
: bending.
: People constantly confuse water alone, as a bending method.
: It's like focusing on the finger pointing at the moon. It's about
: the moon, not the finger.

: NWC is the most flexible wood for stripping so your applied
: pressure is what worked.

No I was using wrc. I know that water does not help in the bending but in this case I found that by making it really wet it helped to as you say be a vehicle for heat transfer. I found that the water allowed it to stay hotter for longer. As for the every couple of weeks thing, I continued to build but found myself second guessing and overly obsessed with that area, in the end with no foundation.

Bending wood is really facinating in that you can make pretty much any shape you want with a heat gun as you say, I learned this after this episode, my next project is going to be a traditional toboggan built with sapelle. Question... how thick of wood is a traditional toboggan? I have plans from a 1987 popular mechanics magazine that call for 1/2 inch. 8, 1/16 laminations of ash but that seems thick and I want to use solid stock sapelle (got like thirty board feet for a box of beer) and give it to my son for christmas.

Sorry to hijack the thread but just the way my head was going.

dave g