Good article on designing living hinges

[Purplie]

… including links to some other good articles.

How To: Design a Living Hinge

[Purplie]

And here are a couple that can bend in more than one direction…

Super Flexible Double Curvature Surface - Laser Cut Plywood

Flexible Sheet 3

[rvogt]

Thanks these are always amazing how solid wood can become so flexible!

[evansd2]

Down with living hinges!

Bending hardwood with kerf cuts (down with living hinges!)

[IMG_8052] Maple/wenge 1/8". No veneer was harmed in the making of this box. Entire box is sanded to 600 grit and waxed/oiled with Feed-n-wax. Overall dimensions: 5 x 2-5/8 x 1-1/8" (127 x 67 x 25mm) I wanted to make a curved box, but I don’t like the look for living hinges, and I don’t want to fool with using veneers to cover them up. Enter kerf cutting. The general idea is that you remove material from the inside of your curve, and the wood can then be successfully bent. I’ll do this a…

[deirdrebeth]

This is great cuz I’ve tried a few times and always end up going back to the tried and true pattern, but personalized ones look so cool!

[Purplie]

@evansd2

Down with living hinges

Another traditional alternative is bent lamination. This can be done at a large scale; at a small scale, you can just laminate two sheets of veneer while wrapped into a curve.

[rbtdanforth]

I show my approach down the discussion that by not connecting the holes it actually uses the full thickness. Also, curves are spreading the stress more than sharp corners.

[evansd2]

Kinda reminds me of this:

Spiral box

Greetings, I am Harmattan. [IMG_5518] I’d been kicking this idea around for a while and decided to finally go for it. It’s not a terribly complicated idea, but getting things to line up and stay adhered to the curved surface was tricky. Enjoy. [IMG_5519] (Maple, various raw veneers, brass rods, neodymium magnets) [IMG_5517] (Maple, various raw veneers)

[timjedwards]

Here mine:

Bendbox experiment

I’ve grumbled several times about the steep learning curve of Fusion 360, but it keeps drawing me back, like Don Quixote to a windmill. So I present to you the Bendbox (aka the “Box-on-a-Diet”), which represents my stab at learning the sheet metal tools and the colorific plugin for the Glowforge: [image] I started with a “simple” sketch of the profile of one side. (It was simple in appearance, but fiddling with properly constraining the relationship between curves was fiddly.) Next I swept …

[evermorian]

I have been meaning to mention this kerf bending calculator:

Kerf Spacing Calculator for Bending Wood - Metric

After I left a comment, the person who runs the site adjusted that to work in the range for stuff we would laser. Not that the math is particularly difficult …