Steaming oak, ripping larch

Stem assembly got roughly cleaned from excess epoxy. It will be beveled before going onto the mold so no need to scrutinize cleaning yet. Just enough to use it as a mold for false stem gluing.

My oak stock has become very dry.
These are leftovers after I repaired frames on Meritaten some years ago. I remember that I could make a 90 degrees bend with 5mm thick slat without any problem.

Well, that was then. When testing now I broke 5mm slat, 3mm went quite OK but the other broke so I tried with 2mm. It went well but I didn’t like the idea of loosing half of my oak into dust while producing these slats. Table saw cut is 3mm wide!

After steaming 5mm test slat it could bend almost 180 degrees without complains so I went with this size. Steaming for 20 minutes (1 hour for 1 inch of thickness).

Clamped “dry” for getting the bend before gluing.

I left them on side to cool down and started cleaning scarf joints on planks.
It turned out pretty OK, I was afraid that proud edges were higher than ply thickness but not.
On the worse-case plank the glue line is just a bit wider than I would like.

Dusty and a bit boring job so I paused it after first few strakes and ripped larch lists, for assembling centerboard case. I will prepare them for gluing and lamination tomorrow.