Timbers And Boards

Wood is one of the oldest engineering materials and still one of the most useful. It is a renewable, workable, surprisingly strong material that comes straight from a living tree, and the way a tree grows leaves clues in the wood - the grain, the rings, the knots - that a designer learns to read. The first and most important split is between softwoods from fast-growing evergreen trees and hardwoods from slower broadleaved trees, a classification based on the type of tree, not simply on how hard the wood feels.

This note covers the 0445 Materials-option timber objectives: classifying natural timbers, their stock forms, properties, environmental impact and uses; the named softwoods (cedar, pine, redwood, spruce) and hardwoods (oak, mahogany, meranti, jelutong); the family of manufactured boards including plywood, chipboard and MDF; and a clear-eyed comparison of when a manufactured board beats solid timber and when it does not.