Can't tell the difference between different types of wood? Save this guide!

When you go to building materials markets or furniture stores, do you encounter this situation?

"Ours is solid wood XXX, environmentally friendly! Ours is ecological XXX, zero formaldehyde!"

The merchants start with a bunch of professional board terms that you have never even heard of: solid wood board, OSB, core board, finger-jointed board, Woxiang board, density board, particle board, spliced ​​board, solid wood composite, particle board, OSB...

I believe your heart must be broken when you hear this!

So what kind of board is suitable for home decoration?

Let’s start from the production and processing links and talk about how mainstream panels are produced.

First, let’s talk about plywood

Plywood is also called plywood, three-ply board, and nine-centimeter board, which are named according to the production process, number of layers, and thickness. Another name is solid wood multi-layer board.

Plywood is peeled from a single tree and rolled like a carpet or stacked to a certain size.

The peeled boards are fed into the side of the machine for gluing. The glued boards are laid out, heat-pressed, and glued together to form plywood. Finally, they are sawn into standard sizes, and the plywood is ready.

(Key points) You can easily understand the characteristics of plywood from its production and materials:

1. Plywood is made of layers of boards glued together, so it is much cheaper than solid wood, has good hardness, and is suitable for on-site cutting and construction.

2. Plywood uses more glue, and because of this, people are gradually not using plywood to make furniture on site.

Advantages: High strength, low bulk density, and excellent bending resistance. Thin core boards provide added strength in load-bearing structures. Their beautiful texture compensates for some of the natural defects of wood and offers excellent decorative qualities.

Disadvantages: Poor stability, which may increase the deformation of the thin core board. The surface is not as neat and smooth as density board and solid wood board, so the thin core board is not suitable for single-sided parts, such as cabinet doors. Generally high cost.

Second, let’s talk about the core board (also called blockboard)

Core board (commonly known as blockboard, wood board) is a base material with a solid wood core. Most of the core boards on the market are solid, glued, and double-sided sanded.

Core board is made of small wood strips spliced ​​together as a core layer, with a piece of wood glued to each side of the surface. It is also called special plywood. It is usually made from a tree or a large timber stump, sawn into small boards of specific specifications and sizes.

Glue the sides of the small wooden boards (mortising is finger-jointing and does not require gluing) and then splice them.

Add glue-coated boards to the top and bottom sides, then heat-press.

Finished product picture

From this we can see the characteristics of the core board: good screw holding force, high strength, solid quality, sound absorption, and heat insulation.

Advantages: Low moisture content and easy processing make it a popular choice for furniture, doors, windows, partitions, radiator covers, curtain boxes, and more. Its interior is made of solid wood strips, requiring minimal processing equipment and facilitating on-site construction. Furthermore, core board is more stable than solid wood.

Disadvantages: The formaldehyde emission is relatively high and the environmental protection standards are relatively low; there are voids inside the board, and if nails are hammered in the gaps, there is basically no nail holding force; the vertical bending and compressive strength is poor, and long-term stress will cause obvious lateral deformation of the board.

3. Next, let’s look at the finger joint board

Finger-jointed boards are also called tooth-jointed boards or solid wood laminates. Many businesses call them solid wood boards, but they are not actually a single piece of solid wood. Boards that are made entirely of solid wood are generally called log boards.

Finger-jointed boards are directly hot-pressed and planed without adding the upper and lower panels. For example, the cutting boards we often use in the kitchen are actually finger-jointed boards.

Compared with ordinary core boards, finger-jointed boards require a comb-tooth mortising machine for mortising.

After the tenoning, the ends of the wood strips are like wooden combs. After the machine splices, the sides are glued, cold pressed, and then sawed into a whole finger-jointed board of standard specifications.

Light and dark teeth comparison chart

There is no essential difference between finger-jointed boards and core boards. The biggest differences are nothing more than the following three points:

1. There is one more process than ordinary core board: mortising (toothing)

2. Compared with ordinary core boards, it has fewer upper and lower surface panels, so less glue is used.

3. The hardness of the finger-jointed board depends on the type of tree the wood strips are made of. Generally, finger-jointed boards with harder wood should be selected to make furniture.

Advantages: The surface is generally painted with clear water paint, which has a better environmental protection effect and can basically reach E0 level, so it is more environmentally friendly and healthy.

Disadvantages: Finger-jointed furniture is not traditional solid wood furniture and therefore lacks the durability of traditional solid wood furniture. Finger-jointed wood is not made of high-quality wood, has a shorter drying time, and contains a higher amount of water, which can easily cause deformation and cracking.

4. Green trend new material - solid wood multi-layer (OSB) board

In recent years, OSB board has emerged in the field of domestic home decoration. It has gradually come into the eyes of Chinese people. Its unique texture and superior performance have led the green trend.

So what kind of material is this? How does it differ from the previous mainstream substrates?

✔ OSB is a high-quality solid wood board made from logs through professional automated equipment through processes such as rotary cutting, drying, gluing, and hot pressing.

✔ OSB is made of formaldehyde-free PMDI glue. The number of structural layers is about twice that of ordinary plywood, the moisture content is 2-4%, and there is zero formaldehyde release.

✔OSB board is an environmentally friendly building decoration material. It has been widely used in construction, decoration, furniture, packaging and other fields in North America, Europe, Japan and other countries. It is an upgraded, updated and replacement product of traditional plywood, blockboard and other boards.

The 360° layer-by-layer arrangement of OSB boards reduces the internal stress of the wood, giving it the following characteristics:

◆Stable structure, high bonding strength, good nail holding force, and excellent environmental performance;

◆The load-bearing and impact-resistant performance is 4 times that of blockboard;

◆Super strong nail holding force, moisture-proof and non-deformable;

◆No joints, no gaps, no cracks, and overall uniformity;

◆Extraordinary processability, original import, zero formaldehyde release;