Woodworking Network: Dukta Flexible Wood is a sandwich of engineered wood and felt layers that allows the material to be bent and shaped readily into curves and contours. Dukta's Zurich location serves as a development and design office, from which it helps clients develop new applications based on its internationally patented dukta incision process, for use in architectural interiors and for numerous products.
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I’m a little confused on how this wood works and what exactly it’s made of. Is it sturdy? Is it structural? Will it hold its shape? That being said, it seems like a product that has a huge market. There have been countless times where I’ve wanted to make something curved out of wood and then opted out of it because it would require either wasting a ton of scrap or steam bending wood, neither of which are ideal. If this wood can hold its shape, it would significantly cut down on production time and depending on the cost, could save money by saving resources. I’m very curious to see I real world application of the Dukta Flexible Wood. It seems like a really smart idea that doesn’t require a ton of extra manufacturing. If it’s just made of wood and felt, it seems that it would be easy to source and distribute. Hopefully it will make its way into the mainstream building world soon!
The use of Dukta seems really interesting - a combination of layered wood and felt to create a flexible material. I wish this article had gone a little more into the properties of this material aside from it’s rise in popularity. I’m curious as to kinds of applications this has, whether it’s use is something akin to facing, like masonite or luan is, or can it have some structural uses as well? I’m also wondering how different it is from bendy/flexible plywood. I checked out the link to the Dukta website they had at the bottom of this article and it says that this type of material also has quote: “excellent sound absorbing properties,” so I could see why this would want to be used in some interior spaces. They also make different types of flexible wood with different incision patterns/ materials for different applications. I’d love to see more examples of how it’s used and future applications of this product.
This new wood seems like something that the theater industry to really latch onto. Just like most things we use in theater, this was not made for the stage, but it can work for it. For many reasons, this seems absolutely perfect to be used on scenery. First, its flexibility makes it something that is super useful for facing panels, flats, and platforms that are curved. Currently, we use a product known as wiggle wood to do this, but one huge issue with wiggle would is that when bent, the grain opens up and is terrible to paint. Also, wiggle wood has zero structure to it, but this new material seems like it might. It also says that the material is sound absorbent. I know if we used this to skin the fronts of weird shaped set pieces the sound department would be very grateful. On top of this, if we used this under decking, it would help dampen the noise of footsteps.
This product is absolutely fascinating! If I had not already selected a material for David Boevers' novel material/tool project, I would probably request to research this material more in depth. To paraphrase what Boevers is often want to say, "Nothing we use in theatre was designed for theatre, we took it and made it our own." I think this product has a number of useful applications. While its flexibility might make it a poor structural element, this could make for excellent facing! However, a big concern I have is with appearance. While I think it looks really cool, it definitely would be difficult to lose that texture. The amount of joint compound necessary to cover that structure completely would be siginificantly more than, say, bendy ply. I do not have the numbers, but I think it would be an interesting exercise to compare not only the base cost of of Dukta vs bendy ply, but also the costs of finishing processes for similar applications. I am not conviced that this material will gain in popularity unless it is economically competetive with competing products.
I’m slightly unclear on what the advantage of this as opposed to bending plywood is. At least based on this images, it doesn’t seem to take a tighter bending radius than 1/8th inch bending ply, and it is a much thicker material. It does have a very distinctive look to it, so it makes sense if that is the look you are going for, but I would imagine this is much more expensive to produce than other bending woods. Based on the video it seems like the wood can be placed in a shape and hold that shape without any additional framing, so it does have that advantage if it is being used as a room partition, but that is a pretty specific application. The video does seem to imply it might be able to move smoothly, so perhaps it could be useful for something kinetic. Overall this does look like a really cool product and I wouldn’t be surprised to see it appear more and more in the architectural world, but I think it is unlikely to overtake bending plywood for theatrical applications.
This looks like a really interesting product that could be used for a lot of different things in our industry. I am curious about what kind of structural integrity it has. I doubt it could be used for any kind of support, but how well does it hold up by itself? Can it be used in set pieces/ props without it getting beaten up and falling apart? We were just talking about how bendy ply can only bend in one direction in Sceno Fab, but this looks like it can bend in many different directions and still hold together which makes me wonder if it could be a practical substitute for that. It does not have the same kind of surface of course so it would still have to finished with muslin of something else like that to give it a more finished look, but I think it does have some potential here.
It is always really interesting to see how different people make their own flexible wood, because there really are a lot of different ways to make wood have a certain type of curvature to it. Even just in Stagecraft 1, we learn from Ben Carter how to create cuts into wood with the radial arm saw that just barely do not go all the way through the wood, and allow for the wood to begin to curve and flex in ways wood does not normally move. We see this in laser cutting too, when people create patterns of cuts that create almost an array; a scattering of lines around the piece that allow for the wood to flex. The pattern featured in the article is definitely a new one for me; it uses boxy corners which I have not really seen used before. It seems to work, so more power to them; it is just a really interesting design compared to more simplistic methods we see in laser cutting.
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