I'm speechless after seeing that firehose picture.Originally Posted by Mike King
There are two advantages to using a planer as opposed to a sander to thickness the laminates. The first is speed. The second is that sanding embeds grit from the belt in the wood and that grit will affect any edge tool you use thereafter on the bent lamination.
Pre-bending the laminates isn't going to help you with the issue which is distributing the pressure over the laminates when they are glued up -- you still need to think about the pressure lines off of the clamps.
I've never used firehose myself, but have heard of using it to provide pressure. Here's a link that gives you an idea of how this works:
https://www.instagram.com/p/BBTT9F9oK6U/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link
There's clearly some issues with this approach: a) there's a lot of pressure involved, and a catastrophic failure can be dangerous, b) I don't know of any sources of information on how to do this -- maybe you can find it, but my googling wasn't promising, and c) the width of the fire hose may not conform to the width of your assembly.
The ratchet straps may be your best solution. However, I suspect that you will still need to clamp the long straights as the ratchet strap is unlikely to apply sufficient pressure to those elements.
One thing that hasn't been mentioned yet is that you need to use an odd number of laminates. This puts the pressure of slip once the assembly is dry in the interior of a laminate rather than on a glue line.
Mike
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