Whatcha paying for plywood?

Just curious if my local supplier is way out of line. His hardwood seems a little high and the plywood is, IMHO, expensive. The BORG sells birch for $44 and Oak for $49 and Lowes has maple for $48. I just bought some oak from the hardwood supplier and it was great plywood but sometimes you don't need the best.

Here are the prices, how do they match what you pay?

Cherry 3/4 plain sawn 103.24 Mahogany 3/4 92.50 Maple 3/4 rotary 64.96 plain sawn 100.80 Apple 127.20 (is this what David Marks uses?) Red Oak 3/4 plain sawn 78.24 rotary 60.95 Walnut 3/4 plain sawn 119.60 Hickory 3/4 plain sawn 98.56 Ash 3/4 plain sawn 104.20 Birch 3/4 plain sawn 56.45

Reply to
Ron
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Our HD still has that Maple/Birch 3/4" ply for $35.

He sometimes uses "ApplyPly" - Amurica's answer to Baltic Birch...

Reply to
patrick conroy

I recently bought 2 4'x8' sheets of MDO plywood, one 1/2" and one 3/4", both faced on both sides and paid $138. I nearly choked.

Lee

Reply to
Lee Gordon

Reply to
JGS

Hmm 48 SqFt of stable high grade stuff for $2.15 a SqFt is going to kill you? If so, time to frame in some resawn solid stock.

Of course, without knowing the grade of the veneers or the core, it's a bit speculative, but 4/4 FAS cherry is almost as expensive in the board hereabouts.

Reply to
George
3/4" A2 PS WO $75.00
Reply to
Eric Ryder

Couldn't compare directly to the choices of veneer.

local 3/4" 4x8 cherry is $49 with luan on one side local 3/4" 4x8 cherry both sides about $75

1/4" 5x5 baltic birch about $13 1/2" 5x5 baltic birch about $20 3/4" 5x5 baltic birch about $30

picked up a "defective" sheet of ply for $5.00 yesterday for shop cabinets. One side has about a 1' area where some of the face ply peeled away.

Same supplier recently had 50 sheets of melamine 3/4" in various colors for $5.00 a sheet, most with a corner or a flake off here and there.

Also picked up a 12" x 8' melamine shelf to make a router fence out of like they just made in Wood Magazine.

Alan

Reply to
Alan W

Isn't melamine MDF with something like formica laminated on it? I got some for free, making a drill press table out of it, main table is 3/4 ply.

Alex

Reply to
AAvK

snipped-for-privacy@usa.xerox.com (Ron) wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@posting.google.com:

Without knowing the grades (or the reputation of the vendor), those don't sound out of line for good quality plywood. You can compare to what Boulter Plywood has on their website - Boulter's not always the cheapest, but in my experience they're competitive & reliably high quality.

"Apple", I think, is maple faces with an alder core (as opposed to the more common luaun or fir in cheap plywood, and poplar in better quality stuff).

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John

Reply to
John McCoy

Depends on two/three things:

(A) Where in the world are you ??? (B) What grade of plywood are talking ??? (A-1,A-2,B-1,B-2,D-4)

How many sheets are you buy> Just curious if my local supplier is way out of line. His hardwood

Reply to
Pat Barber

Somethin' like. But not actually Formica (R) and here is more like particle board than MDF.

Reply to
patrick conroy

"Melamine" is usually particle core material with a paper sheet impregnated with melamine plastic resin bonded to the surfaces. (Yes, I find it odd to call it "melamine"; we don't call maple veneer over particle core "maple", do we?) I've never seen MDF with a melamine surface on it before.

Formica ("formerly micarta") is a material formed of multiple layers of paper impregnated with phenol resins, built up to form a thicker sheet.

(I don't know much more about the resin stuff beyond this.)

Reply to
Daniel

This stuff is particle board or MDF with a super thin and very hard white, plastic-like coating on both sides. Not built-up for thickness in the least.

Alex

Reply to
AAvK

the melamine layer is much thinner than formica type stuff.

Reply to
bridger

at the suppliers I use, all of the melamine faced sheet goods 1/4" and below are on MDF.

Reply to
bridger

A>Rochester NY B>Not sure the grade but it's pretty darn good

Buying 1 sheet at a time

Reply to
Ron

Actually an 8'x4' sheet is only 32SqFt. That makes the oak I just bought for $60 about $1.85/SqFt. Better than solid wood but what I can't get is why the price doesn't relate to the solid price. The difference between Hickory and Cherry ply is $4.69 or 14.6 cents a sqFt. But they sell solid hickory for $2.98 bf vs. cherry at $6.99/ bf. Huge difference in solid, not much in ply. Or how 'bout ash that is $3.25/SqFt in ply but only $2.65/bf solid.

Yeah, yeah I know it depends on the grade and I don't know which grade it is but it just seems a little odd for the price differences.

Reply to
Ron

It may *seem* strange, but where is the plywood manufacturer located, and what does he pay for pine in that location?

Reply to
Greg Millen

Blushes on the math. It's that old supply and demand thing again, modified by other economic realities.

Certain woods respond poorly to veneer slicing operations, certain are in high demand. Which one would you use if you were trying to keep people working? Quality and availability of logs is a big factor, too. Up here we've got birch, maple, red oak in abundance in veneer-quality logs, cherry less, white pine - who cares. The number of sawlogs of the same species does not correspond directly to veneer. There's usually two/three sawlogs to each stick of veneer on the same tree before the next goes for pulp, and the ratio of sawlogs to veneer in the same age range is considerably higher than that.

We also have fir, spruce aspen and red pine for interior plies, but it's more economical to buy it sliced and use local equipment for hardwood. With modern equipment to amortize, the mill actually buys hardwood veneers to run at capacity through temporary shortages. A snowstorm can slow deliveries to next to nothing for a week. Two can empty the deck. A good lawsuit by city dwellers can close off large areas of forest scheduled for harvest at any moment as well. More of them than us.

Guess the best answer is that popularity increases production to grab the higher price, but you can't produce from what you don't have. We don't have walnut, the left coast doesn't have hard maple.

Only the Japanese have birdseye. They even paid to have odd logs hooked out by helicopter.

Reply to
George

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