Bending wood - to build 1930s style radio case

[OneLeftHandOneUndecided]

Howdy,

 

1st post, European spy here (don't tell anyone!)

 

I really like shapes of radios like this one:
Emerson 38 (1935)

yet more pics

I have built stuff from wood before, and they tend to look like the cheaper IKEA stuff (even though I designed them :D). I do not have a workshop or machine park handy, so what I did so far was all very minimalistic and built "in place".
That in mind:

Is bending wood like that difficult? I am thinking about making a similar style case, and I want to put a DIY tube amplifier in there (plus some extra stuff).
What type of wood is this even? The last photo, at the bottom of the page, to the top, slightly left of center of the back of the walls, there is a bit more contrast - looks like this is some type of plywood, with the middle part much thicker than the outer ones - or am I seeing things?
Now, those sides do curve in yet another dimension - are they just panels that likely were made curved by some sort of subtractive process, and then just glued on inner, flat wood? But maybe I could do without them.
The speaker area is a jigsaw job, eh? (I wish I had CNC not good at such precise stuff)
All those embellished edges are probably too compliated / require very skilled work, not like just going over with a hand router. I guess I'd make it, if at all, simpler where it needs to, but try to beep the overall look & feel.

What do you say?

[lew]

My guess is that the wooden shell has been veneered. Not sure how the shell was formed. 

[Cal]

Welcome aboard, glad to have you here.  I don't have any experience with bending wood, but I believe there are some here that do.  Good luck with the project, please post up pics as you work on it.

[lew]

There are a couple of ways to bend wood.

 

Steam bending which requires, you guessed it, steam. That entails a source of steam, a container large enough to hold the material to be bent and forms/clamps to shape the softened wood.

Once you have the setup, the process is pretty straight forward. Some woods are more suitable for bending that others.  https://mebel.bg/en/the-top-5-best-woods-for-steam-bending/#:~:text=In conclusion%2C choosing the right,them ideal for steam bending.

 

Thin material bending is another choice. Gluing thin pieces ( 1/16 to 1/8 inch thick) together and bending around a form while the glue is still wet. Clamped in place until the glue dries

[OneLeftHandOneUndecided]

@lew yeah I've seen some articles that went through steps of different methods, written by who knows, on sites that cover every topic under the sun - how much they knew what they were talking about unclear. Here they list wood types... darn - harder wood better - I was afraid of that. (harder to get here, esp. as thin as that middle layer in the radio pic)
Ah, the gluing of thin stuff... I guess the small amount of tension of bent thin material thus baked into the construction won't be a problem. I was wondering how they might have been glueing something humid, hehe.
I've seen stuff about boiling (req. huge container) or using nasty chemicals, all not for my circumstances. I guess steam is the most realistic option - no one says I can't ad-hoc DIY some enclosure that's impacted by the steaming itself, for a one-off, such as cheap wood from the waste bin at the DIY store.
 

[DAB]

i've never bent wood (except to break it into 2 pieces so it fit in the trash can), so i tend to design things that match my tools and abilities.  straight lines?  i'm all over that.  curves.....eh, you're talking to the wrong guy.

[Gerald]

I suspect most of those cases were laminated around a form and then veneered to give a handsome outside appearance.

I know this is probably not what you are looking for but it might help.

 

[lew]

1 hour ago, Gerald said:

I suspect most of those cases were laminated around a form and then veneered to give a handsome outside appearance.

I know this is probably not what you are looking for but it might help.

 

Cool video, Thanks Gerald!

 

All this talk of old radios stirs up memories of my childhood. Radio was our entertainment at home. The Shadow, Suspense Theater, Sargent Preston, Hop Along Cassidy and many more.

[OneLeftHandOneUndecided]

23 hours ago, lew said:

Cool video, Thanks Gerald!

 

All this talk of old radios stirs up memories of my childhood. Radio was our entertainment at home. The Shadow, Suspense Theater, Sargent Preston, Hop Along Cassidy and many more.

I actually have one good ol' 1950s tube radio that works (restored & safe), and I do use it to listen to radio sometimes - it just sounds different. AM bands did not work too well in an urban environment when I was using just a long wire, picking up all the "dirt" of modern electronic surroundings. Then I found instructions to build a shielded magnetic broadband (i.e. no pesky tuning) loop antenna, and that thing works wonders - picking up little of all the electrical interference, instead mostly the magnetic components of the waves coming in here, and I'm getting long, medium and short wave stuff again. We don't even have stations here ourselves anymore, but at night I can pick up a lot of farther away ones.

My plan for this thing is to, next to the actual tube amp, and a speaker typical for the time, add the "invisible" anachronism of a web interface, and make it source sound files to play from NetworkAttachedStorage. Yeah yeah, every cool kid throws out old electronics of a tube radio & puts in some cheap Bluetooth audio amplifier, but I don't have my music on devices like that nor use streaming services. And I want the characteristic sound. Since the tube amp needs a cable for power anyway, adding a network cable isn't much of a downside. (the single board computer I got laying around does not have WiFi) I just hope there won't be noise problems, but let's see.

[lew]

The old days of AM radio and night time listening. KDKA, WLS, WOWO, WKBW, WBZ!

[Grandpadave52]

2 hours ago, lew said:

WLS, WOWO,

Grew up with WLS and WCFL in Chicago. WOWO was a stretch hoping for skip at night even though it was (is) in the NE corner of the state; Fort Wayne....later years, I could find WOWO to tune in to Indiana University football and especially basketball games. Occasionally I can still find it clearly on my nearly 50 year old Zenith radio I keep in the garage. WLS still comes in but I think all talk radio now.

[Grandpadave52]

BTW,  Welcome @OneLeftHandOneUndecided. Great to have you join us all the way from Deutschland. Looking forward to seeing your project even though I don't understand much of anything electronically you've described. I know, On/Off, volume, channel selector.

[OneLeftHandOneUndecided]

So far I found no good sources for wood that seems it could be used here.
Someone sells pieces of German oak at a smaller the width than I need. Would be bending 3..4 strips, to be put after enother and have to have the same curve so there won't visible gaps, be feasible? It doesn't look as nice as one piece I guess.

Btw, is 5mm (~ 0.2in) a good thickness, for something like that radio?

 

As for radio - youtube has a channel about 1920s, with several videos of the development of radio before and during that time, e.g. how stations, networks, types of programs developed, how it got into households, etc, even some old shows apparently (playlist of 8),

Ah, here it is - the search shows the things I mentioned scrolled way down below (like development of..., programs ...)
https://www.youtube.com/@The1920sChannel/search?query=radio

 

[lew]

Here’s something that might work if you cover the edges