Once upon a time, when Canadian plywood had pride of place on the UK market and the smart wood-based panel of choice was plywood, when Douglas fir ‘good-2-sides’ was a commonly traded specification, COFI publications were prized by specifiers and students alike as the definitive guidance on the use of wood in construction.
This is not a fairy story but I begin in this way as to the majority of readers alighting here, perchance to relish my ‘pearls of wisdom’ (sic), and who are currently employed in the plywood trade, it might as well be.
And thereby hangs another tale! The watchwords throughout the Canadian plywood and lumber industries have always been consistency and reliability. Industry standards and grading rules developed through decades of testing programmes and constant reviewing procedures and enforced with rigorous factory production control ensured international approval of Canadian lumber and plywood, and incorporation into national standards worldwide the design values for structural, load-bearing, applications. This was the ‘norm’.
It was also the system employed by the other plywood manufacturers; I shall call them the ‘bona fide’ ones, as were listed originally in BS 5268: Part 2. The ‘norm’ for plywood and wood-based panels generally, under the European Construction Products Directive (CPD), is now EN 13986, a ‘harmonised’ European Standard invoking the requirement for CE marking.
A simple way of looking at this is that what it requires, for plywood for load-bearing applications, mirrors almost exactly what those ‘bona fide’ plywood manufacturers have always done.
In the UK, the CPD is made law through the Construction Products Regulations, in which it is made clear, for obvious reasons, that when it comes to the supplying of products for construction applications the onus is on the supplier to ensure that what they supply is ‘fit for purpose’.
The current lull has provided the plywood trade with an ideal, if not entirely welcome, opportunity to reacquaint itself with what this means with regard to structural plywood.
