Carpentry Material

‘Wood’ material use in furniture:
1: Solid wood – refer to real wood that chop down from tree (wood log), that cut to plank & timber. Example: Teak wood(use in Balinese furniture & good in outdoor & ship/boat cause of good withstand to weather & moisture), oak wood(some make it to kitchen cabinet but easily cost around 15k in local), cherry wood, pine wood(soft wood) etc etc.
Solid wood is expensive & require high skill to make into furniture cause wood move (shrink & expand according to humidity), warp, tear etc & it is expensive.

That’s why we mostly use ply wood nowadays for cabinet. As for chair, bench, & some table we still use real wood for its strength.
If u thinks that all ur cabinet is making with ply wood… think again. Don’t forget there’s ‘chipboard’ & MDF (medium density fiberboard).



2. Particle board (sort of chipboard)
Poorest quality among ply wood & MDF, better than OSB imo. Bad, bad idea when use in Sink support, fish tank support. Also beware of kitchen top that use chip board (so call postforming- more on it later.) Also use in some laminated flooring.



3. OSB (real chipboard)
Real chipboard, not totally useless. Inexpensive, good sound insulation (that’s what I had heard) God bless u if u use it as cabinet.

I had read other thread in this forum about the confuse of ‘Solid plywood’.
So what exactly is ‘Solid ply’ & ‘non-solid ply’?

These need some explanation:
Back in the day when we cut strip of plywood & make it like a flame. Than paste with 3mm thin veneer (real wood veneer or none real wood veneer-more on this later) to both side to save material. This forms a hollow plywood; U knocks it, it will sound very hollow. (There are still a lot of these nowadays at smaller furniture shop.)
So some of us Interior designer/contractor in order to be better deal than other ID will emphasis that we use solid ply.
I won’t say this type of furniture is totally useless. Why not If u r looking for a lightly use cabinet & got a tight budget. At least it is cheap & still will last u several years.

Solid Plywood
Solid ply means whole piece of plywood (without cutting into flame) paste with veneer.
So plywood is just plywood, there actually no solid ply or non-solid ply. Just that what people make it into.



So that means if ur cabinet is not make by solid wood, chipboard, particle board & MDF it should be plywood right?
Wrong!

Recently things had changed (not sure since when it started), carpenter start to replace plywood with blockboard. Now 90% of custom furniture (just a guess) using blockboard instead of plywood cause it is lighter than ply wood hence easier to work with & handling than plywood so it had become the carpenter's choice.
Moreover it is slightly cheaper than plywood. (I don’t think all ID know this, usually the one that know well is the carpenter himself, not the ID.)



Blockboard
Made out of strip of core of tree, both side paste with a thin layer of ply (3mm?).
Lesser quality than plywood (that’s what I heard from a senior carpenter) because the core of tree is softer than the main body.

Frankly speaking, I’m not sure which is better, Blockboard or plywood cause I never seen a blockboard or work with it back in my carpentry day but too bad cause most price listed as per foot run for kitchen cabinet is not base on plywood.( I could be wrong.) Maybe the ID will need to up the price if u tells him u want ‘solid plywood’.

I believe there’s some pro & cons between the two, like hinges is attached more firmly in blockboard due to light weight? Which one more water resistant?
All & all I’m not too sure but I will take on plywood any day.


Veneer, laminate, post forming, what is that?
It is not too complicated, but still it is not too simple because we misused the word laminate. According to wikipedia, two or more layer of same or different material layer together is call laminate.
So plywood is also laminate.
Lets simplified it here; I will call those veneer, laminate, Formica etc a Skin.



Veneer
Veneer is a thin slice of real wood but in the industrial there’s still ‘mainly’ two types of veneer- Real wood veneer & man-made veneer.
Real wood veneer comes in two forms. One in a roll form (less than 1mm that could cut into strips & later paste at the edge of a said plywood. One comes in 3mm-3.6mm thickness sheet. It is also a 1mm less wood veneer but pre pastes into 3mm ply in factory.

Man-made veneer (Engineered veneer) could be a sheet of printed paper or PVC etc (I’m not too sure what some of the material used) that still could look like wood veneer but less the nice real wood grain.

Laminate
I like to call all laminate, Formica, polyester, PVC what ever unknown material other than real wood- laminate.

Postforming
This term was misused too. Postforming actually means a type of technology to laminate- using heat & pressure to bend the finishing layer (laminate sheet) to the material (example plywood).
It could be Postforming to chipboard too. That’s why a Postforming kitchen top could be chipboard, particle board, plywood etc.


One thing for sure is that the laminate use in postforming top is good as kitchen top because of its heat resistance, water resistance & scratch proof.