Bending rims... sideline from Re: Plate Bushings

[Brian Trout]

A thought came to mind when I was reading about trying to bend the rims on
those old pianos...

I had to put a new soundboard in an old Knabe a while back.  The soundboard
sat on and got glued to a very narrow shelf that wasn't much more than 3/8"
wide around most of the rim.  It was originally constructed in such a way as
to have a board glued to the inner rim, directly on top of the soundboard,
sitting there on edge, but bent around the curved portion of the piano from
nose to treble end of the soundboard.  This ended up being a piece of oak
about 1 1/4 inches tall and about 1/4" thick.  (This is how it was
originally constructed, so in rebuilding it, I put it back together in the
same way.)  The old piece(s) splintered and split apart so badly that there
was no hope of reusing them, so I cut out some pieces from an old piece of
oak I had laying in my shop.

One of the little challenges, which you wouldn't really think about until
you tried to glue this little piece in, was how to bend the little bugger
around all of those curves, and get the thing glued in place without making
a mess getting glue all over the place, and still making a good solid wood
joint.

The original was nailed in, so I figured I'd do the same.  But it took more
than that to nail a flat board to some pretty radical curves.  So what I did
was (this was kind of slow, but it's all I had with me at the time...) held
the strip of wood over an alcohol lamp and bent it, much the same way as we
might bend a hammer shank.  It worked!  I'd bend a little section at a time,
until the piece was pretty much the same shape as the inner rim I was trying
to glue it to.   Once it was all 'burned' into shape, it just laid into it's
spot like it was cut out that way.  And it didn't make a mess either.

I have no idea whether a whole rim could be pre-bent in some similar fashion
to facilitate an easy glue up or not.  It was just a thought that came to
mind.

For what it's worth...

Brian Trout
Quarryville, PA
btrout@desupernet.net