Behind the Scenes at Eric’s Workshop: Bending Rims

When Eric gets an order, or gets kits ready for classes, he simply doesn’t pick items from a bin or online. He has to make them! So here’s another peek at all the work involved in making one basket.

Here’s the basket he is bending rims for, his 5-inch Round Swing Basket…

He has a huge metal container that was custom made for this process, that he places on two burners where he boils strips of wood. Here he’s using a stick to initially grab a piece of wood…

Then he grabs this steaming hot, hot, hot piece with his bare hands. I don’t know how he does that. He has told me, “It is hot and sometimes I say the S-word. But the trick is to move quickly since I only have seconds to bend the wood.”

He then places a metal pin on a custom-made rim mold, specifically for the basket he is working on, this being the 5-inch Round Swing rim mold (yes, he has tons of these rim molds – for every basket he has made).

From Eric: “I tap that pin in as fast as I can and start bending. I make sure I have the correct length pin and hammer all layed out by my side before I pull the wood out of the cooker—so I can quickly start the bending process.”

“This is when we find out if the wood is good for bending.”

When he reaches the end, it’s time to place a metal pin…

From Eric: “This batch was bending well. Sometimes there will be a terrible amount of breakage. If I have about an 80% success rate, I am happy. On baskets that have sharper corners it can turn into a huge number of broken rims and this is when I use the S-word many times.”

S-word? I’ve heard you use worse words than that!

Final step is hammering the end into the mold…

Eric works really fast. But the time I made it back to the workshop, he was on the last rim! I made it just in time.

Next, he will hang up the mold so the rims get nice and dry.

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