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New Possibilities with Bendywood®
Bendywood® offers exciting new possibilities for designers and manufacturers. It is available in beech, ash, oak and maple, and no chemicals are used in the production process. It can be bent in the cold dry state to a radius of about ten times its thickness - i.e. a 10mm thick board can be bent to a radius of 100mm. The patented production technique involves steaming and then compressing hardwood along its length. This process concertinas the cell walls at microscopic level and rather like a bendy straw, allows the cell walls to straighten out again on the outside of a bend without getting into tension. The grain of a bent piece of Bendywood® will follow the curvature with aesthetic and structural benefits. The maximum size that can be produced is 100mm x 120 mm x 2200mm. We can supply longer lengths by joining pieces end-to-end; however this jointing increases the minimum bending radius to twenty times the material thickness. Thin sections can be bent by hand, thicker sections are bent with the application of sufficient force. Bendywood® is bent dry. However, for tight bends or thicker sections (handrails for example), it is sometimes necessary to slightly increase the moisture content of the wood while bending before allowing it to dry again in its new shape. Moisture content is an important consideration. When Bendywood® gets damp it becomes more flexible and expands (in all directions, including length). This process is reversible but means that it should not be used outside or in areas of changeable humidity if a constant size, stiffness and shape is required. Bendywood® is manufactured by Candidus Prugger. We continually find new uses for the material. The most common uses are:
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Candidus Prugger des Georg Prugger Industriezone J.-Kravogl-Str. 10 39042 Brixen Italy T: +39 0472 834530 F: +39 0472 834134 email bendywood |