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Engineered wood and chipboard/ Oriented strand board (OSB) are a very different animal that particleboard or MDF. Each has their purpose. True particleboard is
by abakker 8y ago
Engineered wood and chipboard/ Oriented strand board (OSB) are a very different animal that particleboard or MDF. Each has their purpose. True particleboard is a very crappy material, best used for ballast and being cheap. MDF is smooth, stable, and machinable, and OSB provides a lot of tortional resilience.
For any home woodworkers, I don’t recommend working with OSB or particleboard. However, OSB is moderately waterproof, which neither of the others is.
- samstave 8y agoIn the 80s, in Tahoe, we built a tree-fort near my house. My dad was a general contractor and we had a lot of MDF available to use from his company... Yeah - MDF and SNOW do not a happy tree house make. The MDF sops up water like a sponge and deteriorates into its constituent particulate... which really sucked because our fort had two levels.... We built a house on the truckee river and there was a giant glue-lam beam that was used for the main truss of the roof. It had to be custom ordered from some manufacturer, and when I asked my dad why we were using that, he talked about how the glued laminate layers were stronger than a single material beam.
- abakker 8y agoA critical part of composite materials is that they are dimensionally stable. They don’t warp, elongate, or shrink, which is better than true wood. The glue and different grain orientations counteract the normal movement. The grain patterns in OSB look a lot like those in parts made of forged carbon, and provide a similar purpose.