Baltic Birch and that outer stuff

[Leon]

To save money I purchased 5 sheets of 1/2" 9 ply birch veneer plywood at Lowe's. It has birch veneers on the outside and one side is preprimed. The inner 7 plies may as well be MDF.

I saved $15 per sheet going with this stuff vs. a 4x8 sheet of Baltic birch, $35 vs. $50 per sheet. I bought 5 sheets for the work bench project and for a quilt design wall for my wife's quilting studio. For her design wall I am simply building frame work with the other stuff to hold 1" thick insulation foam board, two of those. The design wall will

88" wide and 92" tall. On top of the foam she will wrap a material to completely cover the foam board and frame work.

The other 4 sheets were for the flat workbench that I recently built.

Anyway I have built countless drawers and several jigs with 1/2" Baltic Birch. Baltic birch plywood is all hardwood outer and inner plies. It just about works like solid wood. I can use 5mm Dominoes in the edges of the material and use 1" pocket hole screws with out the screws collapsing the inner plies.

The other stuff has a pretty tough primer coat. That is all the good I can say about it. The inner plies blow out when tapping in Domino tenons and the 1" pocket hole screws easily crush the inner plies.

I made this material work as it does not have to be pretty and I used a lot of glue so hopefully nothing will come apart.. ;~)

Just a caution that the other stuff is a very far cry from being similar to actual Baltic birch.

And yes 4x8 sheets of 9 ply all birch inner and outer veneer can be had but is costly. As I mentioned above the 1/2", 4x8 Baltic birch plywood is $50 per sheet or $1.56 per square foot. I can get regular 1/2", 5x5 Baltic Birch for $21 per sheet or 84 cents per square foot. That is darn near half the price per square foot as the larger sheet.

Never again for this purpose...

[krw]

For the difference in price, I wouldn't use the Lowes/BORG stuff, either but I have no idea where I'd get at that price. I've seen it close to that for a 2'x2' piece.

[Clare Snyder]

" If you want first quality oats you need to be willing to pay first quality price. If onthe other hand you are willing to settle for oats that have already been throiugh the horse, they DO come a little bit cheaper "

The borg birch faced "plywood" definitely classifies as "already been through the horse".

[Leon]

FWIW Baltic birch pretty much stands more than head and shoulders above the rest, including most any other plywood that my trades supplier has to offer. But BB does not always fill the bill for everything. Regardless of where I bought my non BB material, I would have had the same results.

[Clare Snyder]

I was not casting aspersions on the source - just on the product and I needed to identify the product in some way. Yes, youcan buy basically the same crap at any "lumber supplier".

[Brewster]

That jives with the 5x5 1/2" BB prices I've seen at the nearest HW dealer. The "real" stuff is fantastic to work with, but I have had a few sheets that developed slight bowing. My biggest gripe is the variance in thickness lot-to-lot can be rather extreme.

I'm still amazed at how a tree can be peeled so perfectly like that. It just don't seem right 8^)

-BR

[Leon]

Yeah, a very sharp knife on a lathe like machine. Little waste!

[dpb]

...

VERRRRY, VERRRRRRRRRRY sharp, indeed!

I had opportunity many years ago to incorporate a control system on a veneer mill up in BC. This was plywood mill using Doug fir "twigs" for stock; the "small" (16" and under) leavings the sawmill folk left behind as beneath their dignity/trouble to mess with.

These were 10-ft blanks; standing next to it was a truly remarkable feeling; it just had an evil-sounding hiss to the knife slicing through the material...similar attraction as standing up river at Niagara Falls with the power of the river or the first in line at the railroad crossing.

[Leon]

And to really boggle your mind, just how sharp are the cutters that are used for for making "3 ply" plywood that is only 1/64" thick?? That is not even a hair thicker than .005" for each ply, assuming glue is thinner than that.

[DerbyDad03]

When the plies are that thin, you don't need glue. The molecules just get a ll tangled together. ;-)

[dpb]

...

Indeed. I've not seen one of the super-thin ply mills but many of the furniture-grade veneer mills use a rotating squared blank that isn't spun on its center but rotated like a cam against the knife. That's cutting flitches for book-matching and the like, not face sheets like for ply, of course.

[Leon]

Wow I would like to see that!

[dpb]

Yeah, too bad when I was doing all that stuff lo! those many years ago there wasn't such a thing as a cell phone with video capability; somewhere in the depths of the storage/moving boxes are photos, but those haven't been unpacked since the move back to the farm in 2000...

[Leon]

I miss analog/film, except for that part. ;~)

[DerbyDad03]

I don't miss analog film. I'm doing so much better now than if I had stayed at the big yellow box. The kick in the butt they gave me (and 60K+ others) was the best thing they could do for me.

They expected film to be their cash cow forever while other imaging compani es were leaving them in the dust. In reality, it was great for me that they we re so stubborn/short sighted.

[Leon]

Certain things I do not miss. The cost of film and developing plus storage. I was talking to a friend the other day and mentioned that I missed using film. With film you have to think about your shot, it was going to cost you 15 cents to see the result. And that was 40 years ago. I only liked shooting slide film. That film was easy to develop in the kitchen sink and you could immediately see the results with out having to process further and transfer to paper, like you do with negative film. I studied light and lenses in college so learning to shoot a relatively manual SLR and get the effects that I wanted came pretty easy for me.

Today with digital it is point and shoot a hundred pics. And hope that a few are keepers. It is letting the camera do more and you doing less. And shooting fast still leaves you with artifacts and noise on the point and shooters. I think digital photography is great, but like the dwindling number of woodworkers, the process is lost. I also used to play a LOT of golf, 5 days a week when I was in school. I walked and did not use a golf cart. Today it is hard to find a course, in this area, that will let you walk. Again, if you can ride to where your ball ended up you really don't try as much to get a good shot. The better your shot the less walking in the weeds you do and the fewer balls you lose. ;~)