I'm gearing up to bend the sides for a parlor guitar (no cutaway) & am trying to decide how thick I should make the high-curl koa sides. I use a Fox-style bender with a heating blanket (Blues Creek).
The reason I raise this question is that my last two builds were with claro walnut & myrtle, both high curl & thicknessed to ~ 2 mm (0.080"). They bent with no problems; however, after assembling the box, I did a lot of scraping to get the sides level & worried about getting them too thin & breaking through. So I'm looking for a happy medium: not too thick that the sides crack or the grain separates, & not too thin that I have to worry about scraping through the sides.
Of course, everything depends on the particular piece of wood, but I'm looking for some advice from folks who have worked with high-curl koa.
