Making your own plywood...

[ScaredyCat]

This has been pinging around my brain for a few weeks now, so I thought I'd ask. Has anyone made their own plywood?

I was thinking that you could get some veneers alternate the grain, glue and then use a vacuum press to make it, then trim the edges and you could have custom plywood, mixing some exotic veneer to produce an interesting edge.

Has anyone done this?

I appreciate it's a lot of effort but I have been mulling it over, rather than 'mush brown' edges, having something mixing perhaps Purple Heart and/or Padouk etc...



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[yetloh]

Interesting idea and perfectly feasible, but you would need to have a very good band resaw to get the consistent thickness you'd need if your ply is to be any real size. The down side is the wastage which would be very high and arguably a great waste, particularly of expensive exotic timber. I think the veneers of commercial plywood must be knifecut which would be much less wasteful - no doubt someone on here will know.

Jim

 

[doctor Bob]

Yea but ........... surely totally pointless.
If you are custom making them then you may as well make up 10mm striped strips glued to the edges of standard ply and over veneer the panel with a single veneer sheet

 

[custard]

Most commercial veneers are knife cut. But the logs are usually boiled for many hours to make them soft enough for knife cutting, and really hard tropical timbers, like say Rosewood or Ebony, will still be too hard and must be saw cut.

Furniture makers made odd bits of plywood for special applications (loose tongues for example) long before plywood was even a thing! It's perfectly feasible and you wouldn't need a vac bag, a home made press would be adequate.

I'm less sure about doing it for the visual impact, there's the problem of end grain versus long grain, plus the stripes would be so thin that scale becomes an issue. Appropriate for something you look at from close range (ie a jewellery box), not so good for something that's mainly seen from across a room. But if you did want to go that route then making up some long grain lipping to attach to the edges of a regular ply or MDF sheet would seem the more sensible option.

 

[AES]

Apart from building up small, thinner pieces into thicker stock for a toy, (where, of course I set the grains at roughly 90 degrees to each other, AND made sure to have an odd number of plies, then cramped up using PVA), I wouldn't really call the result "home made ply" as such - at least not in the sense that I think you mean.

BUT in the current edition of the US mag "Scroll saw Woodworking" they have featured a US product which I think goes some way toward the effect you're talking about. It's called "Spectra Ply" and comes from a company called Cousineau Wood Products - http://www.cwp-usa.com.

But it seems rather expensive to me, the price quoted is USD 52 for a single piece three quarters thick x 9.5 x 40 (inches). It also appears from the article that it's made to order, not stocked, as delivery is quoted as 30 days.

Anyway, I've scanned a page with some smaller pix from the article:

View attachment Spectra Ply.pdf

May or not be the sort of thing you're thinking of, but HTH anyway.

 

[ScaredyCat]

Thanks for the replies. I've taken on board your comments

I do appreciate this might be extra effort for little perceived gain and that there may be easier, even better ways to do this. However it is for a project I have in mind that's special and I want it to have the feel that this is a one off, nobody else can have one, it was made for you and no-one else there will never be another.

I might have a go as a proof of concept, just to see how it works out.


.

 

[niagra]

I'm having a go at making a compound curved seat for a chair, so thought I'd have a go at this. Not tried yet but bought a couple of flexible 0.8mm sheets from these guys, ready for when I've made the moulds. The sheets came rolled up, so I definitely know it can cope with the radii I need.

www.thewoodveneerhub.co.uk/birch-flexible-plywood-0-8mm-thick-155cm-x-155cm-61-x-61/

 

[Sgian Dubh]

Something a bit like this when finished maybe? This image came from a LinkedIn post from someone who works at Linyi Wosen which, I'm sure you can guess, is a manufacturer in China, so I suspect ordering a piece perhaps 3' X 2' square wouldn't figure on their radar, ha, ha. Slainte.

 

[Boysie]

I've seen a video of Tom Fidgen making plywood.

https://youtu.be/8yA2cwHLQQk

It looks extremely laborious.

Even more so if you watch the previous video in the series, where he resaws the layers for the ply by hand with a frame saw.

 

[giantbeat]

I make my own ply wood from raw veneer, exotics mixed with birch, maple, beech & mahogany as my standard materials.... its pretty much all i do all day... i press 2-3 ply sheets (used to do it in with a big old screw press) running 2 vac bags, i then form the 2ply & 3ply sheets into drum shells.

 

[chiokli]

Echoing others; it's a matter of scale as to whether it is worth the effort and wastage. I've not made "plywood" in terms of an odd number alternating grain direction glue-up, but have layered thin 1.0-1.5mm strips up into a stock piece for a stripy effect. Making a board is out of the question due to not being able to cut plies large enough like they do with the big spinning knife shavings they do commercially.

I set the band saw up with a 1.5mm gap to the fence, jointed a board, cut a slice, jointed the board again, cut a slice etc. Then set a jig on the rounded portion of the belt sander that had a set gap between the smooth face of the jig and the belt to pass the slices through which sanded the non-jointed face smooth and to an acceptable thickness tolerance.

Neil Paskin actually did this same process on a recent YT video: https://youtu.be/g6USmvvYupw

You do lose 50% of your stock material though. Cost of doing business.

 

[thetyreman]

I've seen a video of Tom Fidgen making plywood.

https://youtu.be/8yA2cwHLQQk

It looks extremely laborious.

Even more so if you watch the previous video in the series, where he resaws the layers for the ply by hand with a frame saw.

cool, I could do with making a frame saw like that

 

[custard]

Making up your own inlay banding is a bit fiddly at first, but once you've done it a few times it's not too difficult. And as well as delivering the exact inlay or edge banding design that you want, it also means you can get a perfect colour match with the timbers you use for any specific project.