Hot pressing is an essential requisite for the manufacture of the three main types – MDF, particleboard and plywood. Different types of plywood are priced differently because of the change in the equality of the materials and processes used. You might also need different plywood suited to a specific purpose alone.
Making the plywood group
Plywoods have two classifications – industrial and construction plywood. The exposure capability and strength will determine the use of plywood which in turn depends on the type of glue used in its making. Veneer grades are N, A, B, C, and D where N has the last number of surface defects. It depends on the Ply laminate pressing during the manufacturing process.
D grade plywood could have numerous knots and splits. This terminology is used to specify the task for the plywood such as “interior C-D” could be used for the subflooring of the house. This specification shows that the face of the plywood is C while the back is D. The glue used is suitable for protected locations alone.
Manufacturing process and thickness
The thickness of the plywood sheets ranges from 1.6 mm to 76 mm. Most of the commonly used plywood has a thickness of 6.4 mm and 19 mm. The thickness must be balanced around the centre. Selecting the trees to make plywood will involve grouping trees not used for making lumber which have a bigger diameter.
Once the trees are selected, they are marked and felled. They use rubber-tyred rollers to load the logs and debarking is done. The peeler blocks are heated and soaked to make the wood soft. Then, they are aligned and fed into the lathe. The veneer is then sorted and stacked according to grade. After assembling the appropriate sections of veneer, the lying and glueing the pieces together takes place.
The glued sheets are loaded into the multiple opening hot press where we can send 20-40 sheets at one time. Each sheet has its own separate slot and the Ply laminate pressing takes place. The rough sheets then pass through a set of saws to trim the edges. The finished sheets are stamped by a grade trademark for easy identification.
Procuring decorative laminates
Manually glueing decorative laminate over plywood takes time and effort. One may use prelaminated plywood sheets from any of the top plywood manufacturers. Instead of doing the work manually, companies use their pressing machines to do a larger amount of work. This results in a decrease in the price and improvement in quality. However, this product might be hard to come by. Decorative laminates incorporate unique designs and have a wide range of colours and shades. You can also get high-gloss laminates for special purposes.
If you press the plywood too fast, the particles are blown out of the side. All kinds of plywood will have some defects. The number of defects will determine the plywood grade. Plywood makes fairly efficient use of trees. One of the most efficient and modern methods envisaged the shredding of the logs into strands completely whereas, in the conventional method, we had to peel the veneer off the face of the tree to make the plywood.
