Bending Purfling?

[Stephen Cowden]

I am planning to use a bwb, shell inlay, bwb purfling. i have the binding pieces bent and am going to use a teflon strip as a spacer for the shell. My question is do I have to pre-bend the bwb fiber strips? I seem to think so because they seem awfully stiff. These aren't individual strips, the bwb fibers strips are one piece. Will these bend on a bending iron? If soaking them will loosen them up how is the glue going to stick to them if they are wet? I plan on using Titebond to glue them in.
Thanks for any advice.

[Barry Daniels]

It is useful to know whether the bwb strips are fiber or wood veneer. Likely they are fiber as that is more common today. They bend easily around most guitar shapes so you don't need to pre-bend. But if you did pre-bend, just use heat. Getting them wet would swell and possibly delaminate them.

[Steve Senseney]

And, If they are wood, they have some kind of glue. Use little moisture, and they should bend fairly easily with a hot iron.

[Waddy Thomson]

They bend dry just fine. I bent some bmbmb (black/maple) in both directions and it worked just fine.

[Stephen Cowden]

These are fiber strips as I mentioned. I will try the hot pipe as I know they won't bend around the tight curves of a cutaway.
Thanks for the responses.

[Craig Bumgarner]

I too have tight bends in the cutaway area on my guitars and gave up on glued up mulit-strips of bwbw..../ I now use individual strips and life is much more relaxed. The problem with the bend multiple glued up strips was 1) breaking them, 2) not getting exactly fair curves which are then difficult to force fit into the ledge in the cutaway area, especially when I have my hand full with the other elements of the binding. Individual strips solve that and bend cold during installation just fine. The require a gentle touch, but I don't worry too much about getting glue between each strip, just plenty underneath, against the edge of the top and between the binding and and the outer most purfling strip. The final finish later on sinks in and glues it well enough.

If you don't have cutaways or similar tight bends, I don't think any of this applies. Bending at the waist is not much of bend really and straight multi-strips can often be bent cold during installation as others have suggested.

[Brad Heinzen]

I always pre-bend my purflings so that glue-ups are a bit easier. I bend dry, with a hot pipe, and have never had much trouble, except for an occasional delamination. I normally use the wood veneer BWB or BWBW.