Bending the Sides

This was easily the trickiest part of the project so far.  I was not really sure how thick the wood could be when I started.  Some of the videos I had seen online showed really thick pieces being bent.  So my first attempts were with wood that was about twice as thick as it should have been.  With the tight curves of my bending form there was no way to make it work.
After several attempts, each with a lesson to be learned, I was finally successful.  I found that I could reliably cut the wood as thin as I needed by using just my table saw.  One pass from each side and I could cut all the way through.  I needed the wood to be about 0.1 inch thick.  I needed it to be already very flexible before I steamed it.  Here's an example of the wood before steaming.  I'm holding it on the floor between my feet.

After getting the steam box going, I put one of the side pieces in at a time and let it steam for about 30 minutes.  I found that it worked a little better if I soaked the wood in water before I started.  Without that step, the wood seemed to want to curl a bit across the short dimension.

Once I pulled the wood out of the steam box, I had only a short time to get it on the form and clamped into position.  Here is what it looked like:

Some things to note...
I found that a scrap piece of PVC pipe fit right into the waist of the side and so I clamped that in first.  Then, instead of individual clamps on the ends, I put a long block across each end and then used two long clamps to pull them together.  This combination kept the piece firmly against the form.  I also added a couple of guide blocks to help me keep the wood straight against the edge of the form.  I moved these guide blocks to the other side for the next piece of wood I bent.  Doing so lets me end up with two sides that will have a straight edge facing the same direction.

The picture above shows the side after removing it from the form.  It turns out my work was not finished there.  While the wood generally holds its shape, it springs back several inches from the form once the clamps are removed.  Before gluing, the sides need to have a shape very near what they will eventually have or else simple glue will not hold them in place.  One of the things I did was to wet the wood again, put it back on the form and then use a hair dryer to really heat up the wood.  The heat seems to be the key and this worked well.