Engineered Lumber Facts

Engineered lumber is changing the wood products industry. Engineered lumber offers a number of advantages over sawn natural lumber. This changing technology has spawned a variety of uses for engineered lumber.

Engineered lumber is lumber made by bonding strips, sheets or particles of wood together with glue. Engineered lumber history reaches back more than 5,500 years to the ancient Egyptians. These ancient builders devised a method of gluing thin sheets of high quality sawn lumber over the top and bottom of lesser quality wood to give the lumber the cosmetic appearance of high quality wood. The structural benefits achieved were secondary.

This process of inventing engineered lumber as wood veneer was repeated again and again throughout history. The development of engineered lumber took a new turn in the mid 1800s when Emmanuel Nobel invented the rotary lathe. This lathe was capable of peeling thin sheets of wood from a beam or board.

Inventions such as engineered lumber are rarely the product of one mind, and so it was with plywood, the first engineered wood. Building upon the knowledge of creating veneer wood and the ability of the rotary lathe to create thin sheets of wood, John K. Mayo was issued a patent for plywood on August 18, 1868.

Engineered lumber took another step forward with the development of oriented strand board in the late 1970s. Since then a number of additional engineered wood products have been developed. These include glua, wood joist, laminat veneer lumber and engineered hardwood flooring.

Many Advantages

Engineered lumber has a number of advantages over sawn natural wood. One of these is strength. Much greater strength is achieved by bonding a number of pieces of wood together when compared with a similar sized piece of natural lumber. Another advantage is straightness and uniformity. Engineered wood, such as glulam is laminated together with specific load bearing qualities and then sawn into uniform dimensions with consistent strength and straightness the entire length of the piece (Applications include simple tasks like table constructions for model trains or other home porjects). Another advantage of engineered lumber is that high quality wood can be manufactured from smaller, faster growing second growth forests. This is an excellent use of forest products as a renewable resource. Finally, engineered lumber doesn’t have to be made from wood at all. In some instances materials such as wheat or rye straw or cane fibres glued in cross-laminated sheets.

The engineered lumber industry does have a couple of hurdles to overcome. One is that engineered lumber doesn’t ‘sound’ as good as natural lumber. The perception about engineered lumber being a less quality material will have to be changed. The second hurdle is price. Engineered lumber prices are generally higher than natural lumber.

Engineered lumber has taken 5,500 years to get to where it is today, but there is no turning back. The building industry has been changed forever by recent developments in engineered lumber technology. More and more the future of building will include engineered lumber.