Only 10 pieces, however, were under .003″ variation within those samples. Outstanding article Bob, thank you. Who else does the retailer supply? The joints were then knocked apart to see if the nails pulled away with the face pieces, or remained in the end of the core being nailed. The core material is specified separately from the face, so you can have maple plywood with a veneer core (which is similar to construction-type plywood) or with a particle- board or medium-density fiberboard core. Maple Wood. Many woodworkers object on principle to using anything but veneer-core plywood. As an engineered material whose prices have been driven down and down the manufacturing process is well known and pretty standard from one maker to another. If you want a country farmhouse look, I think it’s fine. Using plans or information found on SawdustGirl.com indicates that you agree with the Terms of Use policy and will accept full responsibility for the process and outcome of any project you attempt. Make sure the face frames are made with a hardwood like poplar especially if you want cabinet doors. We deliberately placed the screws close to the edge, and we don’t recommend driving screws without drilling a pilot hole. Yes, I still have to sand down the edges and prime and paint. 12 mm x 2 ft. x 4 ft. ACX Radiata Pine Plywood (100) Model# 00065 $ 20 12. Thanks so much! Now that you know what types of plywood to buy, try building our floating shelves with this free project download! Save up to 68% on 7 issues of woodworking projects and tricks. Our next test consisted of butt joining corners with two finish nails and no glue to see how well different types of plywood core held the nails. We thought we understood plywood until we put 11 different samples through a variety of tests. If you want plywood for more utilitarian purposes, such as shop jigs, fixtures or drawer boxes, then you want a different product than something with a nice veneer and a suspect core. You get multiple bids and they’re all different. Particleboard core or MDF (medium density fiberboard) core are the other common types of plywood cores in use. Lastly, don’t be afraid to ask your supplier what they mean by the terms and grades they use. BUT- if you want to leave the interior cabinet carcass raw, or stained, hardwood plywood is the way to go. But here’s the catch about MDF. Robert W. Lang is a former executive editor of Popular Woodworking Magazine. Hardwoods have vessel elements that transport water throughout the wood; under a microscope, these elements appear as pores. Craft projects, DIY signs where you desire defects to the wood for character. The difference in density means red oak is also heavier than poplar. MDF is going to be cheaper, but is a great option if you decide to have the entire structure painted. will be made out of. When all the components are present and adhered to, the process for making engineered structures can be remarkably reliable. Poplar Wood Vs. Subscribe ». Fasteners driven in the edges of plywood can cause an inferior core to split, often delaminating adjacent layers. There are some that say if you prime and paint the MDF so it will not soak up the water, it will be fine… But honestly I will not use MDF in the kitchen, bathrooms or around windows, and instead painted Select Pine boards. More plies are generally better, and hardwood cores are better than softwood. The fir core at left chipped severely while the hardwood core at right had a smooth surface. What surprised us is how much variation there is, even in a small sample. Yes, it’s more expensive than pine, but pine is too soft and will not hold up a cabinet door for long, and will not hold up to the amount or ware-and-tare cabinets get. $0.65 per linear ft for the Select Pine board, but when I cut down a 4x8ft sheet of MDF it’s only $.29 per linear foot. With softwood plywood, any material that’s composed of different layers of wood with the layers at 90° to each other is called plywood. The thinnest veneers are very easy to sand through and often will telegraph any unevenness of the core layers to the finished surface. What core? PureBond panels made from the best quality hardwood plywood are used in making cabinetry, closet systems, fine furniture, architectural millwork and more. Different rules and grades are used for different types of plywood. – Simple Woodworking Projects. In a cabinet door, for example, you want the best appearance possible on the outside. Generally B/BB is the best grade that is available. I ask you, is there a difference between "Spruce Pine" and "Spruce" 2x2 (or 1x3 or 1x2 for that matter). Both plywood and oriented strand board (OSB) are equal in strength and durability. Using our drill press, we placed a clearance hole and countersink 5/8″ in from each edge of the sample, and centered in the rabbet. It can come out splotchy when staining if not approached correctly. Building codes recognize both plywood and OSB to be alike in their properties and use the phrase \"wood structural panel\" to describe them.However, plywood subfloors are stiffer than OSB by about 10%. Going to a lumberyard is like going to a foreign country. Avg. I think the same thing, so way will I use MDF anywhere near where it might get wet. Our samples of red oak from Lowe’s were nearly as consistent in thickness, with an average variation of .003″ in each small sample and a variation of .008″ within the sample group. This comes as a surprise to many consumers because OSB looks simply as if lots of pieces of wood were glued together. Or do you not recommend using hardboard (cut into 8″ X 8′ strips) for shiplap? Here are some supplies and tools we find essential in our everyday work around the shop. It really depends on the look you are going after. This is usually visible at both microscopic level and at the surface — hardwoods tend to have broad leaves, while softwoods tend to have needles and cones. Across the southern reaches of the nation, aspen lumber may be hard to find. Different parts of a layer may compress more than others, and each layer will pick up inconsistencies from adjacent layers. Children's toys made from aspen remain splinter-free. Yellow poplar or tulipwood is widely called poplar by those who buy, sell, and use the wood.. The easiest way to do this is to cut the groove to a smaller dimension and then mill a shallow rabbet on the board’s mate to match the width of the groove. Due to its lightweight, pine is quite popular for bedroom furniture, such as wardrobes, beds, as it is much easier to move this furniture around. Baltic Birch: Another versatile plywood material is Baltic birch. First we checked the thickness. Limit 90 per order. Lots of people prefer Aspen wood paneling over cedar or pine paneling because it’s classic. Ideal for interior use for furniture and trim. Although it is my intention to provide accurate plans and clear instructions, not all plans have been tried and tested. Renovation, cabinet building and woodworking plans and tutorials. To me the risk isn’t worth it. We may receive a commission when you use our affiliate links. With softwood, plywood is plywood and particleboard is particleboard. I strongly suggest using hardwood for all your face frames and cabinet doors. Exactly how do you get a nice-fitting dado joint in an inconsistent, undersized panel? It's often used for rustic pieces, like farmhouse-style tables. Many imported plywoods are manufactured this way and can be a good value. Pine is an inexpensive, lightweight wood that can be yellowish or whitish with brown knots. Sitka Inc. provides a wide range of sustainably sourced top quality timber such as aspen plywood. There are few things a woodworker will ever face that are as confusing as plywood. It doesn't look like maple but it's harder than aspen, about like poplar. For the carcass, if you want a rustic finish, choose a pine wood. General Workability: Aspen is very easy to work with and cut. Your email address will not be published. Will the veneer be so thin that I sand through it with the first pass of the sander? Pros: It's low-cost, and it takes paint well, so it's great for kids' furniture. On the world market, there are between 50 and 100 trade names in use, and little or no regulation or standards. If you’ve never done it before and you don’t know the language, you’ll experience culture shock right off the bat – and sticker shock as well! I always have sheets of this stuff on hand. The total variation was .022″, with an average of .004″ among the small samples. The oak and birch plywood the big home-improvement stores had in stock (about $40) at the time of writing this was graded C3. Other softwoods like spruce and fir will be straight grained but they are tougher and harder than pine. In professional cabinetmaking, they are the preferred materials for quality work because they’re flat and of a consistent thickness. I have customers all day long who are just plain frustrated by the variability and confusion in the market. Aspen’s synthetic underlayment has an advantage. Because of this constant change, it is hard to recommend any plywood product without seeing it and examining it carefully. And frees up some money for some “bling-bling” or more decorative trim. This block was glued from 10 of the 11 samples we measured for thickness. In addition to being a lower grade, the face veneer on inexpensive types of plywood can be as thin as 1/100″ compared to about 1/40″ on better material. Will the edges split if I try to put screws in it? Milwaukee Cares Mask Ordinance Effective July 16th, 2020 - Wednesday, July 15, 2020; UPDATED-Check out our sale prices on shop grade inventory! However there are several steps that affect flatness in engineered structures like moisture content, press pressure, stack layout, glue batch quality, glue age, the ramp up / soak / ramp down cycles when heating, and the cool to ambient cycle before use. The species used in imported plywood can also be a mystery. 15/32 in. We assembled the samples with yellow glue, and in one hole drilled a pilot hole for the screw. (The same holds true for birch and poplar.) Light construction, or crafts and furniture where knotty pine character is desired. Lots of pre-primed trim is made of MDF. x 4 ft. x 8 ft. Tongue-and-Groove Aspen OSB Underlayment Panel (43) Model# 1012405 $ 54 78. Pine is among the worst types of firewood for functional uses (e.g. Each 7 ply 3/4 in. With hardwood plywood, any material can be between the face and back veneers and still be called plywood. Work With Curtis Lumber & Plywood. The names the material is sold under are not the names of specific species. I’ll let you know what type of material I use on different projects and why. (Check out this helpful post on how to stain wood! The wood laser engraves and cuts great. In the seven-ply samples, the splits were much longer, and in the worst cases were several inches long. Although its softness makes it prone to dents and abrasions, it's highly resistant to warping. Plywood, on the other hand, is a type of manufactured wood panel. Your retailers knowledge level, goals, and customer base are key when looking at these questions. You may be surprised to see Pine at the bottom of the list. Pine is an inexpensive, lightweight wood that can be yellowish or whitish with brown knots. Pine has hydrocarbons and phenols that can be removed through kiln-drying, thus making … This free download is exclusive for our e-mail newsletter subscribers. This sounds sensible, but buying a bit to match every thickness of plywood you might come across will only gain you a collection of bits that almost work. Only three of 193 samples measured the same thickness at each corner. You can probably get away with using rotary-cut veneer for something such as the interior of a cabinet, but it won’t look right on an exposed surface next to solid wood. I mainly use it for any shelving that doesn’t need to look pretty and perfect – like basement storage shelving. One question to ask on woodworking or home improvement projects is what species of wood to use. MAIN USES Furniture parts (drawer sides), doors, moulding, picture frames, millwork, toys, … I supposed pine face frames would be fine for display shelves that wouldn’t get much use all the time. (And yes, if you do it right, the edges paint up nicely too!). When it’s painted, you can’t tell if it’s MDF or Wood. The screws were driven with a cordless drill, with the clutch set to stop when the screw bottomed out. The only two samples with a larger average variation, .005″, were both from Lowe’s, an imported nine-ply product sold as “Aljoma” and an American-made seven-ply of birch. Hardwood is what you use for cabinet face frame, cabinet doors, even trim. It provides.. Medium-density fiberboard ($35 average price of 3/4in 4x8ft sheet. The biggest problem is variation in thickness, but uneven or incorrect moisture content can also cause sheets that are warped, bowed or twisted. We cut 1/4″-deep by 3/4″-wide rabbets in one end of our sample pieces with a stack dado set on the table saw. That's a shocker to me! Where do I buy it? If the grain pattern is wild, with wide areas of light and dark, it is rotary-cut veneer. These are glued together. 66% clear cutting area with at least three sides square. Next is plywood. Because the veneer is so thin, this cannot be sanded out. You can write down all the other grade and core construction and face details but as you suggested these have different naming conventions from dealer to dealer and point of origin. We have a tenancy to shoot some messengers in the quest for profits. The moment it comes in contact with moisture it bubbles up and is defected forever. One side note—pine boards usually come in widths up to 11 1/4″, but you can purchase pine plywood. Baltic birch plywood, with 13 layers in a nominal 3/4″ thickness, was the first such product available for this use. Aspen is the whitest wood we carry and makes a great substitute for Holly. Note that pine is a softwood, and generally will shrink or warp easier than a hardwood. It provides.. Aspens COVID-19 RESPONSE: Aspen … And then go build something awesome! Sometimes the outside layer, or sheet, of plywood is made from a hardwood veneer, while the inner layers are usually softwoods, such as southern yellow pine (SYP). https://www.popularwoodworking.com/wp-content/uploads/popwood_logos-01.png, https://www.popularwoodworking.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/june19_machinists_tool_chest10.jpg, Shaker Storage & Shelving Shop Resources Collection, © 2020 Cruz Bay Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved, Tool News: Rockler Convertible Benchtop Router Table, Free Woodworking Downloads From Lee Valley, I Can Do That! If you want a more polished look, I wouldn’t do a “faux shiplap” at all. Can you tell which door trim is made of Select Pine and which one is from a sheet of MDF? Speak to the professionals at Curtis Lumber & Plywood in Springfield, Virginia to learn more about the benefits and disadvantages of Southern Yellow Pine plywood. Limit 90 per order. The third thing to examine is the edge. Would I be able to get them smooth? I am a long time logger who is new to woodworking( just setting up shop). In softwoods, medullary rays and tracheidstransport water and produce sap. Plywood that looks nice, in a species such as cherry, oak or walnut, is graded and priced mainly on the quality and thickness of the face veneer. You can commonly find Birch, Hickory, Oak and Maple hardwood faced plywood at the big box stores and can order any species you like. Build like a Girl®. Sanded plywood, has a softwood outermost layer like pine and is only smooth on one side. Is this list complete? Hardwood plywood is considered to be an appearance product, as opposed to softwood plywood, which is considered a structural material. For hardwood plywood, the grading system for the face veneer is designated by letters: A is the best and D is the worst. Where sold, however, the boards will be high quality, but generally neither unusually wide nor thicker than 1". Yellow pine is pressure-treated, thus it is a great material to utilize for both commercial and residential construction projects. Rotary-cut veneer will look like plywood, rather than solid wood. If this is the look you want, you won’t really care that you are saving a little by going with Aspen wood panels instead of cedar. But one was .005″ thinner than the other. I personally love and use both in different circumstances. - Monday, December 7, … The hardwood cores, and the samples with nine or more plies, tended to split only the layer that contained the screw, and the splits were 1/2″ to 1″ long. MDF and particleboard cores, in spite of being weaker structurally, are flatter and more consistent. Cabinet Grade Plywood. Every builder I have ever talked with has their preference (and sometimes strong opinion) of using MDF vs plywood. It is pretty wood - I like the whitish color, but for doors and such, in lieu of maple or poplar I'd search for alder. ¼ inch width – bottoms of drawers, cabinet door panels or where I would need ¼ width for wall trim detailing. As the trend toward European-style frameless cabinets continues to grow, many cabinet builders are discovering that the composite plywood they’ve been using to build framed cabinets isn’t quite doing the job as well as it should. It also includes plans for a plywood tool storage cabinet. In general, more, thinner plies make for stronger, flatter panels. This is a more expensive option, as it has clean edges and has a nice finish. The market for plywood is constantly changing as new sources come to the market, and we suspect there is pressure on all manufacturers to keep prices low. These names may also change from time to time. (The bed shown is made out of pine.) The first of these is the face veneer, if it is to be exposed. For the sake of comparison at the bottom of the scale, white pine ranks 380. The practical impact of this comes when you make joints. We didn’t even get into 2x material or detailed trim and I hope to get to that some day. Aspen is softer than basswood or linden? But we are going to focus on Sanded Plywood and Hardwood Plywood. PureBond® hardwood plywood from Columbia Forest Products gives you all of that. Required fields are marked *. The grade should be stamped on the side of the sheet but it is often missing in imported plywoods. Actual projects built using Sawdust Girl plans may be published on your own site without instructions or "tutorial" as long as you provide a link to my original post with full post title or "SawdustGirl.com" as link title. Staining, not so much… go with a different hardwood species. It is pretty wood - I like the whitish color, but for doors and such, in lieu of maple or poplar I'd search for alder. Aspen has no odor and imparts no taste to food-stuffs, so it's ideal for baskets, bowls, and containers. It looks a lot like cherry and is … Birch A birch is a thin-leaved deciduous hardwood tree of the genus Betula (), in the family Betulaceae, which also includes alders, hazels, and hornbeams. We began with a 24″ x 24″ square of each type and cut that into 18 pieces that were 3-7/8″ x 7-7/8″. https://www.popularwoodworking.com/wood/choose_the_right_plywood Plywood is a glued and laminated wood that is engineered and overlaid with hardwood veneer and is normally less than 1/16 inch. Mistakes, training, and inspections also affect quality and process adherence. Harder to cut and edges can splinter when cutting. Baltic, Russian and other European birch plywood faces are graded by the letters B (best), BB, CP and C (worst) for both the face and the back. Buy 45 or more $ 49.30. These are normally used for utility or economy applications such as in shops or garages. The carcass is usually made up of a wider width board. Wherever plywood is made, the trees used for core material are fast-growing and have little or no value as solid wood or as face veneer. “Shop Grade,” “Cabinet Grade,” “Stain Grade,” and “Utility Grade” are commonly used terms that aren’t defined by any industry-wide standards. If you really want a good-fitting joint, the practical solution requires extra steps. Greetings from PA. -nice site you have here. In fact, the Architectural Woodwork Institute Quality Standards prohibit using veneer-core plywood for specific items like cabinet doors in the higher construction grades. We made tests on our samples to see what the differences were between the “good stuff” and the “cheap stuff.”. It has a very low-bending classification. If you can work around the structural issues, and overcome your prejudice, you can achieve much better finishes, and easier joinery if you use MDF or particleboard cores. Also comes in 1/2″ and 1/4″). This type of plywood is commonly used to build cabinets and boxes. The results indicate the quality of the core material itself and the quality of the glue bond between the core layers. If the sheet is badly warped or twisted, there is likely a problem in the core layers and conditions won’t improve as the sheet is cut up. All 18 samples of the Baltic birch varied .003″ or less, making this the most consistent material we tested. This type of plywood is commonly used to build cabinets and boxes.
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