Was just watching an appeals court video and the desks for the defense and prosecutors were very curved
How is wood made to curve like that while keeping it level/flat?
There’s four main ways usually, steam bending, kerf cutting, carving, and faking it.
With steam bending you get a bunch of thin pieces of wood, steam them, and then put them in a mold. They dry and hold the shape of the mold. They’re glued together to be a strong curved plywood basically. If I had to guess without seeing it. This was the method used.
With kerf cutting you cut a bunch of parallel lines across the back of the area you want to bend. Just the thickness of your saw blade. The front of the wood is left thick enough to hide the cuts, but thin enough that, often with some steam, you can get the wood to bend closing the gaps cut in the back.
The third way, carving, means you start with a large piece of wood and just cut a curved section out. This is the least common approach as it’s hard, wasteful, grain doesn’t always run in a strong direction, and often impractical to find wood large enough.
Finally, faking it. Usually gluing veneer (a very thin sheet of wood) over something. Think laminate countertops, but the reverse. More and more it’s by just printing on a wood pattern scanned from actual wood or something.
Can multiple pieces of wood be combined into one cogesive+seamless piece?
If there’s multiple pieces, there will be seams, although they may not be visible in a video. This is one of the reasons people ‘fake’ bends: build up the structural wood from multiple pieces, which gets good strength while minimizing material usage, then cover the bent surface with a thin (ie, flexible & inexpensive) veneer, and trim that the to final shape.
Most of the methods mushroommunk described are good for curving wood along its long axis, making the visible/usable surface of the wood curved.
If you mean the desk top is curved, like a C-shape around the user, then they’ve probably just cut the curve into a big sheet or two of engineered lumber (eg. plywood), and covered that with veneer.
Not entirely seamless, but if you do a good job jointing the pieces and select boards that look very similar in color and grain, you can get close enough that most people won’t notice them.
This tabletop is made of three different boards. No fancy joinery, they’re just butt jointed with PVA glue.
Steam bending Ash in the woodworking workshop https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkJOY_N7OKE
Glue the wood into a big rectangle and then cut some off (in the shape of your curve)
Or if the curve is really significant, glue it into a kind of pixellated version and then smooth the corners. Same concept but it can save you some wood.
Very true, but if my wife asks we gotta say we did it the other way because I buy a lot of wood…
