Laminating wood to produce clear or larger sizes is one of the easiest ways to add value to wood products. The Canadian producer is today presented with many choices in wood species, adhesives and equipment available for laminating. Success in this business environment requires that the producer have access to the skills needed to produce durable laminates with whatever wood species, adhesive or processing method requested by the customer.
Available information on properties of various Canadian wood species has usually been limited to particular species or to a specific property. The intent of this report is to fill in the information gaps on the laminating properties of Canadian wood species and, in particular, to see how these species compare to commercially prominent imports.
The eighteen Canadian species examined performed favourably in comparison to the imports while the performance of some of the species variants was not always similar. More difficulty was encountered with laminating with Phenol Resorcinol Formaldehyde (PRF) than with the other adhesives. Radio-frequency (RF) curing also showed some varied results with several species passing delamination testing but failing in the shear block wood failure criterion. Care should be taken when bonding porous woods with low viscosity adhesives.