What is Plywood?
Plywood is made of several 1 mm thick slides of solid wood. Each layer of plywood is usually oriented with its grain running at right angles to the adjacent layer in order to reduce the shrinkage and improve the strength of the finished piece.
History of Plywood Development
Plywood is considered the first type of industrial wood to be invented. Archaeologists found the first appearance of plywood in the tombs of Pharaon in Egypt around 3500 BC. About a thousand years ago, the Chinese knew how to make thin woods and glue them together for interior applications. The British and the ancient French also noted that they applied plywood in the 17th and 18th centuries.
In 1797, Samuel Bentham – a famous British engineer and shipwright – patented a number of thin-walled lumber machines. In his patent registration, he described a concept of gluing thin layers of wood together to form a thicker piece of wood – this is considered to be the first description of the concept of plywood. We use it today.
About 50 years later, Immanuel Nobel, the father of the famous scientist Alfred Nobel, realized that, by combining thin layers of natural wood together, it would form a material sheet with incredible durability.
In 1905, the first plywood was exhibited at the Lewis & Clark Fair in Finland.
In 1928, the first 4 feet x 8 feet (1.2m x 2.4m) plywood boards were introduced in the United States as a construction material.
Nowadays, there are many variety of plywoods that specifically designed for each purposes, such as flexible plywood (known as flexi ply, bending plywood, bendy plywood), container flooring plywood (floor boards), laminated plywood, packing plywood, construction plywood…
The structure of the plywood is divided into three components:
- The core (intestine): consists of many thin layers of veneers with a thickness of about 1mm.
- Surface part: is a layer of natural wood.
- Glue part: the common glue used for plywood is Urea Formaldehyde glue (UF) and Phenol Formaldehyde glue (PF). There are also E1,E2,MR,Melamine,WBP glues…
The raw materials for plywood production are usually pine, birch, fillings, acacia, eucalyptus, etc.
Manufacturing
Our Plywood manufacturing process has 8 main stages:
- Round timber is peeled and cut into logs with required length.
- Log is rotary peeled by machines to make thin veneers.
- Veneers are leaved to dry out and then classified by qualities.
- Layers of veneer are arranged by standard procedure, then glued together with specific glues (E1,E2,MR,Melamine,WBP) to meet the required thickness.
- Layers of glued veneer are heat-pressed to make plywoods.
- Plywood is went through a quality check process.
- Plywood is added final touches: sanding, cover films or cut into customers’ required sizes.
- Packing, stacking and stamping plywoods and ready to delivery to customers.