Steam Boxes

The past few days I have been thinking a lot about steam boxes. This is because I had said that building a steam box would be the first step of my project. For anyone who doesn't know, a steam box is essentially a tube with a pipe connected to some sort of boiling pot of water. You then put a piece of wood inside, boil the water, and the steam encases the wood. The idea is that steaming makes the wood bendable, which is necessary to create the curved lines of a canoe.

So yesterday I went driving around, hoping the blizzard would not hit while I was still out, in search of a large pot and a hot plate. I went to The Reuse Center and Salvation Army, thinking that these things might be sold there, and also wanting to be at least a little green with this project. I did not find these things at either place, and returned home to rethink my plan.

This morning my dad and I were sitting in the kitchen table talking steam boxes and he brought up my mom's cousin's husband, Roger. (Did you follow that one?) Roger has his own workshop that he built behind his house and does a ton of woodworking. I called him, and after a bit of confusion on who I was and what I was asking because I had woken him up for a nap, told me that he actually built a steam box a few years back, but never used it for the project he had meant it more. It was just collecting sawdust. We decided I should come and look at it.

His workshop is gorgeous. It is covered in sawdust and has huge windows and he recently installed a furnace so it can be nice and toasty in the winter. He is currently making a dining room table, which he is absolutely meticulous about. He pulled out his steam box, which is probably 5 feet of PVC piping with holes in it, a tube connected to the middle of this, and an old propane tank that you'd fill with water. He also pulled down from somewhere up in the ceiling the bottom of his turkey fryer, which he would have used to heat the tank.

It's a beautiful contraption. It's ingenious. He had followed a pattern he found on line. He offered to lend it to me a thousand times, saying he wasn't using it. So I took him up on it.

There are some things I will still have to do to make it work. I'll need more PVC to screw onto each end to make it long enough for the strips of the canoe, which will be most likely around 12 or 13 feet. The propane tank needs a hole in the top to release pressure and also fill with water. The scary part of this is that is the tank runs out of water and is still on, there's quite a potential for it to explode. That's not exactly what I was going for, especially when propane from a turkey fryer is involved. I need to figure out how to put a hole in the top of that. I am also thinking that I want to go back to the hot plate idea, instead of the turkey fryer and propane. Will it work if I heat water in the tank simply using the hot plate?