Wood pre-bending in longboard making
Hi, before I got into longboarding and DIY longboard making I used to do DIY guitars for a few years and what strikes me when I look at either commercial or DIY longboard manufacturing is that no one seem to use a technique that’s typical in wood processing which is wood bending using steaming. Of course, steaming introduce the moisture, but this could be solved with drying the board properly before having it finished. Have You tried to use that, or heard about anyone using this technique?
Reason I am thinking about is that it could allow to use more advanced curvatures like the drops or wheel wells / flares in vertically laminated decks, ie. I am thinking about pre-bending few sections of softer wood which could be glued in between thin (6mm) layers of non-bent hardwood, and then laminated with fiberglass or carbon on top and bottom - similar construction to something like comet cruiser but with more crazy geometry. Obviously that create weaker spots in the hardwood as You won’t have the hardwood fibers going parallely through all of the length of the board but I am having a feeling that top and bottom composite laminate would be enough to keep the board strength. Or the vertical layers of the composite could be added in between the softwood and hardwood.
Another benefit I see is the lack of Horizontal lamination which is typical case of the board fatigue failures.
I know this sounds crazy, as it’s not a process that is typically used in commercial builds but commercial processes are often cost driven, so maybe this is something that would be beneficial in DIY building where You don’t necessarly watch for every penny? And every innovation sounds crazy before it is succesfully implemented, right? 😀