First big bend

I have been itching to try and make a big bend on a tree for a while, but since my trees were not ready for it I had to wait. And I HATE wait, but bonsai is good for teaching one patience.

So today I decided it is the time to start. One of my Virginia Pines is the subject. Here are the pictures before and after.

But, in between there was a lot of work. Unfortunately, I was doing it by myself so I had to figure out how to bend and tighten wires alone. Here is the "process pictures".

I should explain the first picture. I did not have a piece of ribar long anough to do the bends so I use a broom stick which did the job. Also, before I did anything I tied the tree to a piece of 2x6 with stainless steel wire. Two reasons for it. First, I needed to tie the tree down better. Second, I did not want to damage the pot (it is a sign Yamaki pot) so the pressure is on the wood instead of the pot.

Then I set a guy wire (stainless steel is much stronger than copper and can take a lot of abuse. After I set it up I realized that I cannot push down on the tree and tighten the wire on my own so I decided to use the jack. You can see how I set up two loops from the same guy wire. It took three steps of closing the jack and resetting it until I got to the end. At some point the anchor wire started opening up so I had to close it and I added another one to make sure it did not snap. Working with stainless steel wire is hard - I used a couple of cheap pliers because wire eats up the teeth on the pliers fast.

After the bending was done I replaced the stainless steel wire with copper since it does not take as much strength to hold it in place. Also, I added a couple of guy wires to reinforce the weak points on the trunk so that the bend is distributed over the length of the trunk.

Finally, I need to thank Peter Tea for talking to me about how to make those bends and for posting about them. Also for convincing me to buy the stainless steel wire when I was visiting him in Japan. You can learn a ton from Peter's blog. Go to Post Index and read everything on Bending Technique. In addition, I need to the Juan Andrade, who is apprenticing at Aichi-en now, for all his posts on facebook and the inspiration.