Why I hate HD Birch Plywood--Part II

[scmhogg]

In a prior post, I wrote about the horrible 3/4" Birch Ply from HD, that I used for some step-stools. Here is a picture of two small cut-offs that were left over.

The Birch is thin, you can barely see it in the pic. It is no wonder that it is unstable, when you look at the voids and the overlapping substrates. Never again.



Steve

[jonmulzer]

Wow! That's bad. Real bad. I buy birch plywood from Lowe's fairly frequently and I have never seen anything like that. Ours is actually pretty good and I always wondered why everyone is down on big box plywood. Now I see why.

[chopnhack]

Steve, I had a similar experience and have since stayed away from it. Its ridiculous... I have seen at BORG a different plywood from a US company that was pretty nice. Kinda spendy though.

[Slik Geek]

I've had even worse voids in HD birch plywood. Never again.

[pbui3057]

The Arauco stuff from Lowes is actually pretty good I think. About $40 a sheet for 3/4" 4x8. I have never used the ones from HD.

[robtonya]

I have used the stuff at Woodcraft, it had no problems like that at all. I got the 13 ply Baltic Birch, 3/4" thick, 5'x5' sheet for something like $55. I'm not exact on the price, because I bought a Festool TS-55 circular saw at the same time.

[BrazosJake]

While at the local HD yesterday, I noticed they're again carrying domestically-produced, lumber-core Columbia plywood. The posted pic looks like the 18mm Chinese stuff. I've never fooled with the latter but heard the horror stories about it. The domestic plywood is much better, IMO. They had some pretty good looking maple for around $55 for a 3/4 4x8 sheet. The domestic is also closer to 3/4, usually about 23/32.

[Pappy]

I have used the Maple/Birch ply that used to show up in HD and had pretty good luck with it. I think I still have about 15 sheets of it stashed in my shed. I am using the HD 3/4" sanded ply to make interior jambs. I haven't had a lot of voids in the 2 sheets I ripped so far. Some bowing, but at 7' x 4 1/2" I would expect that. The bow comes out easily when I shim and install it with 16 ga finish nails.

On a side note, I saw a article on a web site of the methods used to produce some of the imported (China) plys. Basically it was glued and layed up by hand, outside, and set in a manually operated press. The dried(?) substrate was then cut to rough size and run through a sander before the outside veneers were added. I'm sure this was a worse case scenario but even in the mechanized plants the quality control probably isn't much better.