The secrets to amazing steam bending are: getting good wood, building smart jigs, staying organized, and avoiding everything you find on the Internet about the topic (except for maybe this post).
I’m getting set up here to do a run of steam bent keyhole cockpit coamings with freshly sawn white oak from Zena Forest Products.
Making these is the only challenging part of building one of my kayaks, which has less to do with the difficulty of the bending itself and more to do with just finding 8 foot long quality bending Oak. We sell these coamings in our kayak building kits and also separately for people who want to skip that part of the process.
My steaming set up is pretty simple. I run the hose from a wallpaper steamer into the end of an 8 foot long piece of 3 inch ABS pipe that is tied to a 2 x 4 with rags shoved in one end and draped over the other.
The last picture is the bending wood page from one of my kayak building plan sets.
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