Outer Packing-Pallet is covered with plywood or carton and steel tapes for strength The paper coating gives the normally rough fir face veneers a smooth, hard, paint-ready surface. Engine and gear were retrieved from the ruined Rescue Minor, and the following winter Patrick built the client another Atkin powerboat. As the sidebar on page 42 illustrates, the stamp on the plywood doesnt always correlate with the advertised quality. If you want to make plywood, your veneer mill has to be in Gabon, where it can benefit the local economy. The queasy reality is that if it can happen to him it can happen to me and you. There isnt a Lloyds agent standing on the assembly line with a clipboard, so bad stuff can slip through, but the bump in quality of BS 1088 panels with the Lloyds Register stamp is pronounced. Like most, this is a voluntary standard, though in my experience the domestic marine fir is uniformly high quality. Almost any one of those features would disqualify plywood from use in my shop, and it illustrates the variability of quality permitted under the standard. Likewise, fir is notorious for checking as soon as you get it outdoors. How sustainable are okoume, sapele, and meranti? Khaya is the original African mahogany. Thirty years ago it was considered more or less interchangeable with okoume, but as the resource has dwindled it has all but vanished from the U.S. market.
Soon the bubbling had spread to the hull. In order to attain the level of form and finish seen here, a builder must be careful in choosing stock. Reach out to us here.
This will eliminate potential flooring issues resulting from insufficient and incorrect fastener placement.
The glued-lapstrake plywood boats of Iain Oughtred or John Brooks, for example, are an excellent fit for sapele. Meranti belongs to the family Dipterocarpaceae, lowland rainforest trees that are native to Southeast Asia. The companies that have been around a long time have a track record of consistent quality. He said he can accept either phone calls or emails, but he prefers to speak over the phone to be sure there is no miscommunication.
Like okoume, sapele is made into plywood at mills all over the world, and panel quality ranges from calamitous to surpassing. A few minutes on the Internet will give you some idea of the quality, reliability, and sustainability of your chosen marine plywood source. Starting at 14 (6mm) thickness, the imported varieties will have five veneers or more. Any charlatan can slap flimsy okoume face veneers onto Chinese poplar, have a stamp made, and call it BS 1088.
Sapele is more expensive than both meranti and okoume, but its grain is more appealing. RevolutionPly plywood is a higher quality panel than Meranti plywood and Lauan/Luan plywood. Click here to remove banner ads from this forum. Veneer quality is the primary difference between marine plywood and the stuff at the home center. (The veneers are shipped to the southwest of France for drying and assembly. In the rare instance you find such an imperfection, do not use the panel. (For those keeping track, the new equivalent is BS EN 315.) The pulling boat below is made of it. All veneers are Douglas-fir or western larch. Plywood shoppers seeking some sort of safe harbor in the mayhem of the BS 1088 marketplace can look to Lloyds Register Group, Ltd. Lloyds Register is an organization that will, for a tidy fee, validate compliance with standards such as BS 1088. Okoume is the easiest to bend of the popular marine plywoods. RevolutionPly panels should acclimate 24 to 48 hours in a climate controlled home environment of approximately 70 degrees Fahrenheit. The phenolic glue is black and will show up more readily if you sand into it. RevolutionPlyplywood is manufactured from plantation and sustainable wood sources and is a far betteralternative to Meranti plywood and Lauan/Luan plywoodthat originates from poorly managed tropical rainforests. Speaking as someone whos cut up more marine plywood than most, theres nothing about that small sample to suggest fraud.
It was developed as a weatherproof material for the manufacture of highway signs, and it does indeed take paint well and is durable. It has a dark color sometimes resembling walnut. Not all mills and not all species enjoy such protections, and plywood from good, certified outfits is a lot more expensive. Some boats were even designed around 4 12 or 4 16 panels. Although 5 10 panels are common in Europe, Ive yet to see any on these shores that were up to standard, or for which I was willing to pay the high shipping costs. Exterior grade panels are acceptable for plywood boat construction., Glen L. Witt, Boatbuilding with Plywood, 1962, AC [exterior plywood] gets my vote because of its competitive price, its wide availability, and its equivalent building strength., Harold Dynamite Payson, Build the New Instant Boats, 1984. His number is (800) 438-6069 ext. Construction adhesive can be used in conjunction with fasteners (nails, narrow crown staples) in order to properly secure the panels. Now officially retired, BS 6566 persists as a recognized standard for slightly lesser plywood. No. In spite of the boats impermeable epoxy coating, the veneer in the 12mm sapele plywood deck began lifting in the hot Maryland sun.
If the glue dispenser hiccups or the plywood is hastened through the hot press, the veneers wont bond properly and the stage is set for a delamination disaster.
Plywood quality varies depending upon its intended use, and builders should be well acquainted with grading standards. For devoted conservationists, logging in delicate ecosystems for profit is a curse upon the land and the people who dwell in it. The second method is to leave an expansion joint, approximately the thickness of a nickel, between the panels, and fill the seams with a Portland Cement-based seam filler. Heres what I can tell you, based on my 20-year relationship with the French mill Joubert, Chesapeake Light Crafts main supplier. Independent of the FSC chain of custody rating, Joubert also holds a PEFC (Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification) rating, a strict European standard for sustainability. Use fir marine plywood for heavy boats that need to be strong and rot-resistant, and dont have a lot of tricky bends. Its appropriate for interior bulkheads, engine boxes, cockpit soles, and so on. Its available in a marine spec, though I suspect most of it is sold to signmakers. I stumbled upon a product made by Columbia Forest Products (locations throughout the East coast). It has the characteristically redolent grain of sapele; there are no core voids and certainly no delamination; the face veneers are blemish-free, if a little thin, and its sapele all the way through. Which side of the panel goes face down in flooring underlayment applications? For heavier boats that wont be varnished, marine-grade fir plywood continues to be a sound choice.
Its worth a few more bucks. Well start with domestic marine fir, as its an easy one. Once a particular stand has been harvested, loggers may not enter that area again for 25 years. He said the price difference between that and the bending ply was approximately $2.00 cheaper per 4x8 panel. Thicker panels (9mm and up) have a more uniform quality, perhaps because the economics of thicker panels work better for the plywood mills. Yes. Built-in order protection service in alibaba.com. 246). I'd really hesitate to use bending plywood for the walls or ceiling. Theres good BS 6566 and lousy BS 1088. So how do you find the good imported stuff? Even if you could find a panel not riddled with core voids, it would be warped like a potato chip. Resplendent in dark blue, the Rescue Minor slid into the Chesapeake and the delighted owner moved the boat to a lift on his dock. Ribbon-stripe plywood uses such sliced veneers, although theyre narrower still, and taken from quarter-sawn logs. Okoume is the most common choice for small-boat construction: it is soft, flexible, and light. By law, no okoume logs may leave the country. Stick with the A-A variety, which means both face veneers are reasonably clear.
Marine plywood manufacturers who sign up for Lloyds Register Type Approval receive regular factory inspections, submit samples, and in general are expected to shoot straight. At the moment its the only homegrown marine ply on the market, with our own American Plywood Association minding the standards. Its expensive, so if youre committed to using sapele, look for the Lloyds Register Type Approval. (The U.S. equivalent would be ANSI, the American National Standards Institute.). As the most popular of the tropical imports, okoume is available in a large variety of thicknesses, from 1.5mm up to 18mm. RevolutionPly plywood contains no tropical hardwoods or species from endangered forests. The trees are selectively harvested; foresters locate trees with a GPS. Our preferred method is to lightly butt the panels together for a patch-free installation.
He told me that they do make, and sell through Home Depot as a special order from the Pro Desk, a regular construction 1/8" birch plywood with one good face suitable for finishing. Go to Patriot Timber's Flex and Look Test Page to see the 4 simple steps or to watch a short video. Its really heavy. Its a cousin to lauan. First lets cover the basics of plywood. Welcome Guest. British Standards are issued by the BSI Group, which operates under a Royal charter and administers national standards for British manufacturers. It has to do with managing moisture content, veneer orientation, and veneer thickness. Glue for marine plywood is a settled science. There are no BS 1088 police was a line I heard repeated by several different suppliers. I have on my desk as I write this a scrap of the plywood used to build the doomed Rescue Minor. How do you perform the Flex and Look Test? Contemporary plywood hulls can be elegant and refined. For strength and durability the 19'6" Rescue Minor was planked with expensive 18mm sapele marine plywood over a male mold, then righted for decking and trim. As you research your options, take a moment to reflect: This stuff really does grow on trees. We use BS 6566 okoume selectively at Chesapeake Light Craft without issue. More about that in a moment. Blocking and bracing is recommended if you are installing directly to studs, as there may be some flex in the wall panel surface. Still have a question not answered? We are pleased to bring you the following RevolutionPlyplywood related frequently asked questions. ), The current relevant grade is APA PS1-09. The Magazine for Wooden Boat Owners, Builders and Designers. As someone ethically involved in keeping wooden boatbuilding alive and accessible, I appreciate all sides of the argument. Excessive or illegal logging and the fact that some Dipterocarpaceae species are endangered has led big-box stores such as Home Depot and Lowes to limit its use in the United States. Apply self-leveler to the structural subfloor or existing floor prior to the installation of the RevolutionPly panels. Modestly good underlayment-grade lauan plywood could still be had, but the paper-thin face veneers and crumbly core that distinguishes lauan today would be the norm by the early 1990s. Once upon a time, it was common to order marine plywood in lengths greater than 8. Please Login or Register. I wished Id done it myself. Since the face veneers find their way to the plywood sheets in sequential order, its common to find a grain feature echoed right down through a pallet of a hundred sheets. As my purchases grew from a hundred sheets, to multiple pallets, and eventually to entire shipping containers of okoume, I sometimes found myself in the same spot as Patrick Mertaugh at Choptank Boatworks (see sidebar, A Plywood Horror Story,) I could specify internationally recognized standards for my marine plywood, such as the exalted BS 1088 (see below), yet receive a shipment of plywood not fit for drawer bottoms. At the end of the production line, the plywood is trimmed and stacked for shipping. Its easier to list what BS 1088 allows than what it prohibits: Sound pin knots, as many as two per square foot on average; longitudinal joints in the face veneers every 20cm; variations in the advertised thicknessfor example, 6mm plywood can range between 5.35mm and 6.04mm. Sapele is a tall deciduous tree, a relative of African mahogany. Some Lloyds Register marine panels will fail the most basic tests. Rotary-cut veneers are dried with great care to a moisture content of less than 8 percent. To correctly secure RevolutionPlypanels to the subfloor,the minimum spacing requirement between each fastener is every 4 on center in the body of the panel and every 2 along the panel perimeter. With the delamination not confined to a single area or a particular sheet or thickness of plywood, the owner and the boats horrified builder grasped the grim truth: The entire shipment of plywood was faulty, and the damage beyond repair. Nevertheless, Vendia Marine Plank may point the way to the future of boatbuilding plywood: local species sliced into high-quality panels in small, artisanal batches. While this was once open to some debate, in 2017 it almost goes without saying that marine fir plywood should be sealed in fiberglass or epoxy or both. (Epoxy and fiberglass stick to the phenolic coating just fine.). Jiangsu Hanbao Building Material Co., Ltd. 100000 cubic meters per Month Bending plywood, Bending plywood flexible marine plywood for sale, Standard Packing Inner Packing-Pallet is wrapped with a 0.20mm plastic bag The, No. Trapped water will turn okoume into mulch, and soon. Thinner panels, such as the 4mm thickness common in kayaks, tend to strain the BS 1088 standards if marked as such; Ive never seen a single thin panel of meranti that I liked.
The face veneers feature abrupt transitions between hard and soft grain, which makes a smooth surface difficult to achieve without a stabilizing coating of epoxy. The $75,000 boat was a total loss. Nowadays its unusual for suppliers to stock sheets larger than 4 8 (1.23 meters 2.5 meters). Relatively inexpensive in marine-grade spec, meranti appeals to amateur boatbuilders. The veneer has a lovely fudge-ripple-swirl figure that most find irresistible under varnish. No more than 7 percent of the okoume in the forest may be taken annually, a number chosen to ensure sustainability indefinitely. It aint pretty. If there is any residual adhesive, you can remove it using either Naphtha, Goo Gone, mineral spirits or by lightly sanding the area. Glued-lapstrake boats built of Vendia Marine Plank are strikingly handsome with a clear finish.
For flooring underlayment applications, can screws be used when fastening, ICC-700 National Green Building Standard (NGBS), What is the best way to remove the label from the backside of the, Meranti Plywood / Lauan / Luan vs. RevolutionPly. Patriot Timber Products, Inc.117 S Westgate DriveGreensboro, NC 27407Fax: 336-299-4050, Go to Patriot Timber's Flex and Look Test Page to see the 4 simple steps or to watch a short video. Do not use drywall screws. Patrick was stuck with a lost winters work, or an upwind slog through the legal system, or both. For now, Vendia is expensive and hard to get in the United States, and it comes in unusual sizes (16 100 is one option). When I spoke to U.S. State Department officials with experience in equatorial Africa, they said that the European mills like Joubert were doing it right (their words) in terms of sustainability, though more work remains to ensure that citizens in places such as the Congo Basin share in the wealth generated by the industry.
It grows in close stands, the trees reaching a height of over 100, the trunks thick and straight. While classified as a hardwood, its soft, flexible, and very light. Its not very durable, but judicious use of fiberglass and epoxy will take care of that. Several suppliers told me that MDO shouldnt be used below the waterline because the relevant standards allow more core voids than marine plywood, but durable utility skiffs have in fact been built out of it. I once ordered some 4 16 plywood and received two 8-footers joined by an arrestingly ugly glued scarf. We have found the easiest method is to heat the label with a hairdryer prior to removal. 
PS1-09 places major restrictions on face veneer repairs and core voids in plywood labeled Marine A-A.. The big mills insist that the resource is prudently and thoughtfully managed and offer as proof alphabet soups of official certifications, some of which cost millions of dollars to obtain. RevolutionPlyplywood should be fastened every 6 on center along the panel ends and edges and 12 on center over wall studs in the panel field. SO, I did just get off the phone with Austin at Columbia Forest Products. Nearly all marine plywood is made by peeling a giant continuous sheet of veneer off a spinning log, like tissue paper off a roll. 
While made of the same glue and tropical hardwoods, BS 6566 or BS EN 315 panels are described as exterior rather than marine grade. More blemishes in the face veneers, larger core voids (if filled), and mixing of species is permitted. The best imported marine panels will have face veneers without blemishes, patches, or seams in the veneer. Okoume is now so ubiquitous in small-boat construction that it scarcely needs introduction. I'd think the lack of rigidity across the bending axis would translate to a significant loss of strength vs. traditional 1/8" ply. We strongly recommend you read our full instructions on using seam filler and how to prevent telegraphing seams in ourRevolutionPlyInstallation Instructionsor by watching ourSurePlyPremium Underlayment Installation Video. Our preferred method is to lightly butt the panels together for a patch-free installation. Balancing the sheets in the factory so that they dont warp is tricky, so you should watch out for unstable panels. Douglas-fir marine plywood is strong and rot resistant, but due to its unstable grain is a poor choice for fine finishing unless sheathed in fiberglass. In 2010 Patrick Mertaugh, a professional boatbuilder, was commissioned to build a plywood powerboat to William Atkins Rescue Minor design. Average and better marine plywood will be free of core voids. My understanding is that both the bending and the regular 1/8" plywood typically have 3 layers, but the difference lies with the orientation of the grain. The result has the strength and stability of plywood but looks a lot more like solid timber. In addition, gluing the underlayment panels to your structural subfloor will eliminate the opportunity to remove the underlayment for a future floor replacement. Please note you may leave an expansion joint without seam filler when theRevolutionPlypanels are installed under carpet, engineered floors, or wood floors. Jouberts plywood has the highest level of certification offered by the Forestry Stewardship Council. It was sapele, Patrick said, generally the best marine plywood money can buy. The plywood was also stamped BS 1088, the code indicating conformity with the universally accepted British Standards Institute specifications for marine plywood. The screw you choose should not penetrate through the bottom of the subfloor. Possibly the best current source for birch ply, from Northern Maine ~ Proud new owner of Lola, a 1960 Shasta Airflyte and Pearl, a 1962 Mobile Scout. JH. Plywood made of such veneers is known as rotary-cut plywood. It requires a razor-sharp new cutting bit in the CNC machine at Chesapeake Light Craft. It is strong and stable, like all plywood, but because it's made from sliced rather than peeled veneer it resembles solid wood. Plywood with sliced veneers has faces assembled from several narrower widths, cut like sliced cheese from one-half of a split log.
It looks just fine! The BS 1088 specification applies to tropical hardwood plywoodthat is to say, okoume, sapele, meranti, and a few others. Most plywood is rotary cutthat is, it is made from long sheets of thin veneer peeled from straight logs. They make what they call Purebond Radius Bending Plywood, I forgot to put the contact information.
And his email is ARBartlett@columbiaforestproducts.com That is the email address on the quote. Weve even cut airplane parts out of it. Gaps in the inner pliesso called core voidsare one of the qualities that separate good plywood from the mediocre stuff. A great deal has changed in the world of plywood since those masters of the medium made the recommendations quoted above. 
Gluing underlayment panels to the subfloor can cause problems such as a tack and release floor that crackles when you walk across it.
Jouberts okoume comes from the country of Gabon, whose government exercises unusual caution and oversight in extracting the resource. Aucoumea klaineana is an African hardwood found in the Congo Basin. Strong for its weight and with a pleasing honey-colored grain figure, okoume is a heaven-sent choice for lightweight stitch-and-glue boats. Its changed very little in 50 years, and the quality is uniformly good. Let us all know how it all works out Theresa God grant me the strength to restore the trailers I can. (Okoume requires about 70 years from planting to harvest.). Thicker plywood takes longer to cure. Set it aside, and contact Patriot Timber Products immediately for a resolution. Patrick is well familiar with marine plywood: before opening his own shop, he had worked through mountains of the stuff as a staff boatbuilder at my own firm, Chesapeake Light Craft. Its impossible to talk about marine plywood without a clear-eyed discussion of the classification system. This will be a fairly long read, so I apologize, but it very well may be worth your time if you are looking for 1/8" birch plywood. A lamentable amount of plywood no better than home center underlayment is advertised as BS 1088, with unflinching villains ready to sell the stuff to bargain-hunting boatbuilders. Two summers ago I started the search for my plywood, that could be found anywhere in the top half of Maine, without breaking the bank. As of this writing it remains the only widely available domestically grown marine-grade plywood. Okoume was the stock in trade when I joined the nascent Chesapeake Light Craft in 1994. RevolutionPlyplywood can be installed directly to wall studs as well as placed over a solid wall surface such as existing sheetrock, paneling or other wall covering. More on shipping and other trade services. Please note you may leave an expansion joint without seam filler when the, Better Alternative than Lauan and Meranti Plywood, For flooring and paneling applications, how long should the. To qualify as marine plywood, a panel must have no voids. Patricks understanding and resourceful customer declared force majeure instead of unleashing lawyers. ), A single, privately owned 600,000-hectare (about 2,300 sq miles) forest yields 90 percent of Jouberts okoume. MOQ 1x20'FCL All the veneersin RevolutionPly plywood come from plantation and sustainable wood sources. Among the stamps youll see on marine plywood are the letters WBP. This stands for water and boil proof, resistance to boiling being the established standard for the strength of glues. They are not for direct exterior exposure. In my experience MDOs hard phenolic surface is bloody awful to sand, so its use should be restricted to sheathing jobs requiring a minimum of patching and fairing. The Flex and Look Test is an important procedure that only takes a few seconds and should be applied to any panel prior to use. The prospective plywood boatbuilder of 2017 wades into a thicket of unenforced standards, uneven quality, and outright flim-flammery. Boats designed for it, especially of the stitch-and-glue variety, might be difficult to assemble if a stiffer material such as fir or meranti were substituted. for Bending plywood poplar bendable plywood lowes price. I started building boats in the 1980s. Consult the designer before swapping species. This includes stringent chain of custody rules that begin with each individual tree, the health of communities nearby, the welfare of workers, and so on up the line until the plywood arrives in the United States. The second method is to leave an expansion joint, approximately the thickness of a nickel, between the panels, and fill the seams with a Portland Cement-based seam filler. The melamine glue is somewhere between clear and milky-white, and some builders prefer this for panels in which sanding might reveal the glue lines. If a self-leveler is needed, it should never be applied on top of the RevolutionPly plywood. In other words, its perfect for peeling into plywood veneers. RevolutionPly panels are designed for interior applications only.
Equatorial Africa is damp, and plywood made there would warp the moment it arrived in a less humid climate. Ive had trouble with the grain of its face veneers tearing when cut. BS 1088 is the coin of the realm, the sine qua non of plywood grades. And count on fiberglassing and painting the plywood.
A few suppliers will make up long panels to order, sparing you the trouble of sharpening your plane and cutting scarf joints. Again, his name is Austin Bartlett. Stability is the secret recipe of a plywood factory, said Michael Geoffroy, of the French okoume specialists Joubert, and thats about all he would tell me. John C. Harris designs, builds, and writes about boats at Chesapeake Light Craft in Annapolis, Maryland. The exterior-grade AC fir plywood that Dynamite Payson advocated was already in precipitous decline. It is heavier and stiffer than its closest competitor, okoume. The seams were sheathed in fiberglass and the entire boat was coated inside and out with epoxy. The veneers are sprayed with glue, stacked up with the grain of each layer at 90 degrees to the next, then squashed in a heated press for a few minutes. MDO, or Medium Density Overlay plywood, has a layer of paper bonded to one or both surfaces, impregnated with phenolic resin. Sapele is denser, heavier, and stronger than okoume, making it an excellent choice for boats that have wide unsupported spans and dont rely on fiberglass. How did Patrick, a professional boatbuilder with lots of marine plywood experience, suffer such a spectacular swindle? An Awlgrip primer and LPU paint finished the job. A cubic foot weighs just over 25 lbs. Sliced and ribbon-stripe panels are common in marine grades, but are used mainly for decorative joinery. In my experience both are equally durable.