SECTION 10: Engineered wood products
The term ‘engineered wood products’ is applied to products made from wood components, such as chips, sawdust, solid pieces or veneers. Most of these items use an adhesive to bond the components together into a sheet, beam or other composite product.
In general, the term does not refer to items made from individual cellulose fibres, such as pulp or paper – although there are certain panels (e.g. hardboard) that are manufactured from compressed fibres.
Some people reserve the term ‘engineered wood product’ just for structural items, such as I-beams, glulam beams, LVLs and so on. In these cases, other wood-based sheet products – like plywood, particleboard and MDF – are simply called ‘sheet’ or ‘panel’ products.
In this section, we’ll group all wood-based structural and panel products together and discuss their general principles of manufacture. The best way to find detailed information on specific items is to look up the brochures or data sheets published by the various manufacturers.
Contents
There are five lessons in this section: