Well here I go again, spouting off about lumber… This time around, I’m off on “engineered lumber” (EL from here on)… EL covers a broad range of materials, but for the most part, they are all made from wood. There seems to be an EL product for almost every use one can imagine. Plywood, Chipboard, and MDF are products most people come across in their daily lives. (Chipboard and MDF you find in cheap furniture, cabinets, etc) For the most part the idea of the EL is a good one, use every little bit of the tree, and get a product that is very consistent from one piece to another. Well there are other kinds that you don’t run across all the time, that have their plusses and minuses… Today’s beef is with something everyone refers to as “Finger Joint” Lumber.
Finger Joint Lumber (FJL) is made in the sizes of regular lumber that is rated on its face appearance, rather than lumber that is strength rated. That translates to mostly the 1x (called one-by) and 5/4 (said as five quarter) series of lumber. There are EL products for the structural grades too (2x, 4x, 6x, etc), but I don’t have much experience with them. What FJL is, is taking lots of short, narrow pieces of lumber, and gluing them together end to end with a finger joint. (hence the name) I was highly leery of this idea when I first saw the material come into the shops around here 4 years ago or so… In the entertainment industry, we use this grade of material for structural applications, which it is naturally not intended for since it is graded on its appearance… So it took some time, but over the years, I have come to love this material, and more importantly, trust it… The manufacturers are now trashing that trust as the quality of the material has gone way down over the last year.
Occasionally you would run across a piece of lumber that had a bad glue joint, and it would simply fall apart at that point. I can accept that, I know the machines that make this stuff aren’t perfect. The problem also was always very evident, you would pick up the stick, and it would snap at the weak point. You can have that same kind of break on regular lumber at a knot, so it really wasn’t a problem… Now, the manufacturers have decided to squeeze some more material out of the tree. They are now using more little pieces, and the parts have gotten narrower. So instead of having two parallel lines of the small pieces glued side by side to make up a board, now you have 6 or 7 parallel runs in the board. That’s a whole lot more glue joint to potentially go bad in the manufacturing process. And surprise, surprise, they’re going bad… The last 3 batches of lumber I’ve gotten in, I have lost almost 25% to bad glue joints. With traditional lumber, the loss due to defects was anywhere from 15-30% on any given show. When I started in with the FJL, I was looking at a loss around 3-4%, which offset the increased cost of the material. If I’m looking at 25% of this material going bad on a constant basis, I’m going to be forced to go back to real lumber. That means more trees getting cut down since regular lumber is far more wasteful in the manufacturing process… I admit freely that I don’t buy material based on saving the environment. I have a responsibility to buy whatever is the best product for a given application. The FJL has been an excellent choice for a few years now, as the price has been equivalent to regular lumber… I beat and scream at my lumber yard about the quality going downhill, and I hope they’re screaming at their supplier, but I suspect not. I am a VERY small portion of the market… The manufacturers don’t care about the structural integrity of a product they are making for appearance reasons. Their solution is that I should be using one of their structural products.
If one of the structural types of EL filled my needs, and was competitive in price, I would be all over it. I do in fact use a few of those products for various applications… The problem with EL is that it is Heavy… In the neighborhood of 30-40% heavier than its real wood equivalent… The FJL weighs almost the same as the material I have replaced with it, because it is made from a slightly lighter wood, which offsets the additional weight of the glue.
They had done such a good job of making the change over to the FJL an easy one, and now, they’re essentially throwing all that away… Fortunately, there isn’t any special equipment involved in working with FJL, so switching back to real wood is very easy… The problem for me is that I have to re-think how much lumber gets lost, how many bits of scenery will go bad in storage due to warping, and how much more storage I need to have to keep an acceptable amount in stock. Oh well… If it means getting something that is consistent again, I’ll switch back to what we all were running away from in the past… At least I could predict what that lumber would do by looking at it… FJL always looks good, until it fails completely…
Somebody bring me the head of the manufacturer, impaled on a pike… And make sure its a solid wood pike...