ENCYCLOPEDIA OF WOOD

VENEERS AND. MANUFACTURED BOARDS

The time-honored technique of veneering can transform a simple cabinet door into a flamboyant burst of color and grain, an unassuming piece of furniture into a seamless work of art.

And though wood veneers have shifted in and out of favor over the centuries, woodworkers have used them to mar­velous effect since the ancient Egyptians embellished objects with thin sheets of precious woods. In the 18th and early 19th Centuries, fine veneers became the hallmark of sophisticated, high-style furniture. Large swaths of distinctive wood veneers covered tabletops; mar­quetry pictures—delicate patterns made by aligning pieces of veneer and inset­ting them in the surrounding wood—decorated all manner of cabinetry.

Veneering declined with the advent of production machin­ery in the 19th Century, only to rebound once again in the early 20th Century with advances in manufactured board tech­nology and improved adhesives. As materials continue to improve, veneering makes more sense than ever. Furniture that would be prohibitively expensive to craft from solid exot­ic woods can be veneered with the same woods at a much more reasonable cost.

And, of course, veneering today offers the same esthetic advantages it always has. With veneers, woodworkers are free to create stunning grain patterns with such techniques as book­matching or slip-matching; they can arrange veneers in an
array of appealing configurations—her­ringbone and reverse-diamond among others. They can also take full advantage of such beautiful but unstable wood cuts as crotch and burl, which are impossi­ble to work with in solid form.

The old masters veneered over a sol­id-wood base, or substrate, using hot glue made from animal hides, blood and bones. They smoothed the veneer and pressed out air bubbles with special hammers. While hammer-veneering is still practiced, today’s craftsmen may choose a more modern veneer press; they can also choose from a much wider selection of glues and substrates. The glue maybe an aliphatic - or plastic-resin type; the substrate may be any one of a number of manufac­tured boards, most popularly plywood, particleboard or medi­um-density fiberboard. The introduction of these manufactured boards revolutionized furniture design: Because the boards are dimensionally stable—they neither swell nor shrink with seasonal changes in humidity—traditional frame-and-panel designs can be replaced by large unbroken veneered surfaces.

Of the variety of manufactured boards, cabinetmakers prob­ably make the most use of plywood, itself a product of veneer construction. Plywood is available in many grades for many uses; always buy the best you can afford. Cabinet-grade hard­wood plywood, which is already faced with attractive veneers, is a cost-effective alternative to solid wood—ideal for such projects as wall and floor cabinets, bookcases and drawer fronts.

Manufactured boards offer the solidity of hardwood along with greater dimensional stability. Clockwise from lower left is a sampling of the most popular cabinetmaking types: softwood plywood, medium-den­sity fiberboard, particleboard, hardboard and Baltic birch plywood.

VENEERS

A GALLERY OF COMMON DECORATIVE VENEERS