Is It Better to Choose Plywood Furniture with More Layers?

Panel furniture refers to flat furniture that is mainly made of wood-based panels and assembled with hardware or round rods and tenons. The continuous increase in consumer demand has made the boundaries between panel furniture and solid wood furniture more and more blurred. Wooden panel furniture refers to wooden furniture whose frame is made of solid wood, and the panel or inner panel of the frame is made of veneer wood-based panel. With the availability of wood resources, wood-based panels will be widely used in furniture. The wood-based panels commonly used in the furniture industry include plywood, blockboard, medium-density fiberboard, and particleboard. They also have their own characteristics, no one is better, only suitable.

Plywood is a kind of man-made board produced by modern plywood furniture manufacturers. It cuts logs into veneers by rotary cutting or planing, and then forms odd-numbered pieces according to the principle that the fiber direction of adjacent layers is vertical (one horizontal and one vertical) , and then glued and pressed. Generally speaking, the veneer (surface board) on the surface of the plywood will use better tree species, while the middle veneer (core board) will use common tree species.

In order to increase the anisotropy of natural wood as much as possible and make the wood properties of plywood furniture uniform and stable in shape, the structure of plywood should follow two basic principles: one is symmetry, and the other is the veneer fibers perpendicular to the adjacent layers. The principle of symmetry requires that the veneers on both sides of the symmetrical plane of the plywood should be symmetrical to each other, regardless of the nature of the wood, the thickness of the veneer, the number of layers, the direction of the fibers, and the moisture content. In the same plywood, veneers of the same species and thickness can be used, or veneers of different species and thickness can be used, but the symmetrical veneers must have the same species and thickness. So plywood is usually made into 3, 5, 7 odd layers.

1. Characteristics of plywood furniture

The plywood furniture board, materials of bent plywood desk, has a large area and is easy to process; the thickness of the board is small, but the strength and hardness are not bad, the impact resistance and durability are good, and the nail holding force perpendicular to the board surface is high; the characteristic of natural wood is that it is easy to crack along the grain direction, and Plywood is cross-laminated wood, so there is no need to worry about cracking when nailing or screwing; due to the balanced structural characteristics of plywood, the forces on adjacent veneers can cancel each other out, thereby reducing warping deformation caused by wood anisotropy and drying shrinkage and expansion.

Therefore, in panel furniture, plywood is often made of large-area components by plywood manufacturers, such as door panels, panels, back panels, side panels, top panels of cabinet furniture, seating surfaces of chairs, bottom panels of drawers, etc. The surface coating of plywood can also be made into various decorative plywood, such as pasting veneer, paper, plastic, metal and other finishing materials on its surface. Plywood trimmed with shaving teak and beech veneer can replace precious wood for furniture components.

2. The more layers of plywood furniture, the better the anisotropy of the wood can be improved

Under the premise that the total thickness of modern plywood furniture is fixed, how good is the number of plywood layers, or is it better to have fewer layers? The more layers of plywood, the better the anisotropy of the wood will be improved. But the number of layers also means that more glue is used, and more environmentally friendly glue is needed to meet the requirements; in addition, the more layers, the smaller the thickness of the veneer, which puts forward higher requirements for wood species and planing and rotary cutting processes; at the same time , the veneer with small thickness will have more quality variation factors. Therefore, multi-layer plywood has higher requirements on technology and materials, and its quality and price will be higher accordingly.