Using Steam to Fix Broken Wood

I recently acquired a nice old Stanley No. 5 1/2 hand plane that I got for a great price due to it having a broken knob where someone had dropped it. I've got a few spare ones I could have used, but I wanted to see if I could bend the broken part back without snapping it off.

I knew it was possible to bend wood after steaming it, but I had never tried it so this was a nice little experience to learn something new.

1. Broken handplane or some other piece of timber you want to bend.
2. Pot
3. Vegetable Steamer
4. Stove
5. Water
6. Glue

The first step was to take the plane apart so I could fix the handle. The bolt was also bent, so I straightened that out by holding it in the vice and tapping it with a hammer unit it was straight.

To steam the knob I just used some basic kitchen equipment, in this case a pot filled with water and a vegetable steamer on top. I placed the knob into the steamer and put the lid on and then turned the cooker on to bring it to a boil.

I did a quick google search on how long to steam it for and found some information about an hour for each inch the wood is thick. I ended up giving it a bit more than an hour since the wood was extremely dry.

Once I had finished steaming the knob I quickly tried to bend the broken piece back and the wood was very flexible and it moved back without any further damage. I used a small drill vice to clamp the broken knob in the correct position and left it to cool down and 'set'.

I allowed the wood to dry out as the steam had made it a little wet. Now, using some epoxy glue I filled the break with and clamped it in the final position.

Whenever I am cleaning up one of these knobs I run a piece of threaded bar through the centre and use a couple of nuts to lock it in place. In the past I've used a drill to spin the knob against some sandpaper, but Ive now got a awesome little lathe I can use. Also the epoxy glue had leaked out and it was much easier to use a turning chisel to clean up the knob.

You can also see there was a large crack through the top of the knob, the best way to fix these is to keep filling the crack with superglue.

After the superglue had dried I used some sandpaper on the knob while the lathe was spinning it. For the final sanding I used some steel wool to really smooth it out.

Over the years, Stanley has used many different types of wood for the handles on their planes and unfortunately this plane used one of the cheaper ones without the nice colours. I ended up using some wood dye to darken it up before giving it a couple of coats of Polyurethane.

After reassembling the plane, I was extremely pleased with the result. This instructable only covers a small part of the restoration of the plane, but it was a fun little experiment that gives me some confidence to try steaming a larger piece of wood in the future.