Plywood Void Question - Sawmill Creek Woodworking

I bought some 3/4" birch plywood yesterday. It's sold as A2 but marked A1. Comes from Rockwell in Canada and is $90 a sheet. When I was breaking it down last night (and I love my Makita track saw for this!), I found the voids show in the photo. I was surprised as I've seen stuff like this is the material sold as shop grade, but I expected this to be better.

I emailed the supplier and they said "The grade of plywood you purchased is an a2-vc. The a2 is the grade of the face veneers (front and back) only. The core of plywood is made up of 4 different grade with grades K and L being the most common sold. These 2 grades do allow voids and overlaps in the core only and can not be under the face veneers."

So, is this what other people see? Should I expect that in this quality material? It probably doesn't matter as the plywood is still straight and flat, but it wasn't what I expected.

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Matt

I find voids and weak glue joints fairly often in birch plywood. Grades are tricky to use because, as the supplier said, they refer to the face and back plies. Notice that this is 5-ply. To me that always means lower quality, utility grade. If you want better quality 3/4" plywood buy 13-ply Baltic Birch. You pay your money and you take your choice. If you would like to read more about plywood, have a look at chapter 5 of my book, Notes and Reflections While Shaving Wood. An Acrobat copy is available free at http://plaza.ufl.edu/chepler/

Doug Hepler

I hate shopping for plywood. I used to get my plywood from HD or Lowes. I was making a cabinet for the kitchen so I decided to get plywood from a real wood place. I paid more for it and it was very bad. It had a lot of voids and it peeled apart by itself. Once cut it would bow and twist. The outside veneer was half as thick as anything at the borg.

Pretty typical, and it varies unit to unit. Just like veneer quality will vary from sheet to sheet. Sometimes you won't get hardly any, sometimes you rip a sheet and go what the heck guys!

It's unfortunate, but the way it is. Some of it has to do with how the sheets are spec'd out from where they are getting them. There's a lot of options on cores, layups, and tolerance.



I don't know if you have any cabinet shops near you, but I typically keep a fair amount of material in stock, and I'd be happy as a clam to sell you that sheet for $20 less and put another $17 in my pocket. I'm paying about $53 a sheet for white two face birch from Roseburg. I don't use poplar plywood much, but I'd bet it's cheaper yet.

FWIW, I bought 3 sheets of paint grade birch in Houston for $37 (each) cash last week. It was $43 n a credit card. It had only a few 1-2mm voids inside. It was actually good enough for stain on ~ 97% of both sides. Best deal I've found so far, from a smallish local supplier to trim carpenters.

My normal dealer quit carrying birch because, they said, the price for the quality they wanted got up to around $100 a sheet. They said something about new tariffs.

I can't find baltic birch plywood anywhere near me, and none of the big box hardware stores sell the metric equivalent of the 4x8 sheet...just smaller sheets. There are a couple of distributors near Mannheim and Heidelberg who will sell full sheets to individuals, but they only stock beech and won't deliver less than 50 sheets. Fortunately, I have a pickup and can haul my own material.

A 4x8 sheet of 3/4-inch (xx19mm) of beech plywood (called multiplexplatte here) in grade A/B is $119 at today's exchange rate. Without the VAT, the price is $100 a sheet.

+1

If you are looking for more details, kindly visit XINFUSHI.

I won't say that it's an easy thing to add, due to the 3-face texturing issue, but it sure would be nice. 

A bit more variety on the materials front would be MOST welcome. 

Todd
Product Design Collection (Inventor Pro, 3DSMax, HSMWorks)
Fusion 360 / Fusion Team

Hey @sprior913,

Unfortunately, the project to create a plywood appearance was more difficult than initially thought, and the team was unable to come up with a reliable way to create a 3D texture representing plywood. 

In the Idea Station post linked below, there is a comment with a decent workaround if you are looking for realistic 3D renders of plywood, and if you are simply looking for it in two dimensions, you could always create a custom Fusion appearance based off a particular texture you find suitable.

https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/fusion-360-ideastation/request-for-plywood-shaders/idi-p/

Sorry this didn't happen.

Lucas Prokopiak
Fusion 360 Product Manager (Sketch/Model)

      Problem with plywood is that it could not be assigned as material to any object size like other F360 materials. Plywood has standard sheet size x  and 4,6,8,9,10,12,15,18,21,24,30,35 and 40 mm thickness options. So you cannot assign plywood to x200x80 component, something like that does not exist, you need to join components for that.

     I made new parametric component for 18mm - 13 layer plywood. First feature in timeline is box (first layer of plywood) that is after copied and rotated. Edit box feature, put length between 0- and widht between  0- and you will get needed piece, even layers of dark UF adhesive are presented for realistic look. Do not change box thickness, it is set for 18mm plywood. If you need some irregular shape cut it your own way. You can also change to any F360 solid wood appearance. 

    Dimensions are from SVEZA birch plywood, veener layer is 1.26mm and adhesive layer is 0.135mm. The veener could be more realistic, because plywood has peeled veener and this one is sliced.  This metod could be done for all other plywood thicknesses.

https://a360.co/2ZFqzxK

@urkee that might be the correct technical idea but I never model the layers when doing furniture design.

Procedural plywood is not that hard to be honest because it is a mix various materials as a layered cake.

keep in mind also that with the plywood in rendering you wont get often close to the surface - so even a simplified approach will still yield enough detail.

Too bad they put it on hold.

If you want to learn more, please visit our website plywood x .

Claas Kuhnen

Faculty Industrial Design – Wayne State Universit

Chair Interior Design – Wayne State University

Owner studioKuhnen – product : interface : design

So, I found out a way of doing a relatively good looking and perfectly usable and performant plywood appearance, bare with me:

 If you add this texture as an appearence, of 200x200 mm and set roughness to 1.0, you will have this: 

 If you then go to: "Texture map controls" > Set projection to cylindrical, chose the axis to be the smallest dimension of the body and or component (can be done to both), and then uncheck capped, we will have this:

 not amusing right? If you desire you can apply a plain wood grain to the top and bottom faces. BUT, where this "hack" shines is in complex bodies:

 (this is real time btw)

Hope it can be useful to someone. 
Thanks and bye!

Nice!

Agreed, for a flat piece of plywood with perpendicular straight edges , this is relatively easy to do.

However, if you have to edit the geometry and add cuts, your work starts again, which would not be the case when using a solid wood (procedural) texture.

Also, in furniture design bent laminate structures are very common and that is where this technique can come to its limits. While NURBS surfaces also have UV coordinates, the UV's of trimmed NURBS surfaces don't necessarily follow the bend lines of a given piece of furniture.

As it pertains to external render engines, the issues its not what CAN be done, but what you HAVE to do. I sometimes use an external render engine myself (Indigo Renderer) because some of the things I do require a spectral render engine and also better camera and lighting control.

The issue is that this is a one way street. Design changes in Fusion 360 result in a lot of repetitive work. Exporting and importing stuff again, texturing etc. For a final render that is fine, but I find textures important for quick design iterations as well, so having this as a procedural solid wood texture within Fusion 360 would tremendously speed up the workflow.

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