Something Else (Part Eight in a Series)
21 February 2008
The virtues of bamboo have been explored at length now: it is sustainable and strong—as strong as maple, some people say. And the weakness of it as a building material in the Western world—that spindly shape—is also evident. Now we have to determine what, if anything can be done with such a thing.
The ideal product would be some form of plywood. Sawdust particles are mixed with glue and pressed into sheets, thus making particleboard. A similar process gathers the straw from harvested wheat and makes it into wheat board. However, these products do have problems and limitations.
Particleboard, to choose the product most people are familiar with, has two major problems that are worth mentioning here. The first is that the sawdust is bound together with formaldehyde glues, which are extremely toxic. Similar types of glues are often used in laminating wood, and the one constant warning for those "doing this at home" is to make sure they have the very best respiratory protection available, as breathing formaldehyde glue particles for an extended period of time does incredibly nasty things to one’s lungs, not to mention what it also does to the air all of us must breathe.
The second problem is that particleboard has a pebbly surface that can only be sanded reasonably flat. It can be used to construct cabinets and the like, but it is rarely used for these purposes without some major modifications. Simply varnishing a particleboard cabinet would result in something rather ugly. The most common solution—and the one that is commonly used in the construction of European-style cabinetry—is to coat the particleboard with Melamine, which is a plastic that is now available in a number of colors.
Most of the cabinetry now available is made of Melamine, and used in the typical small kitchen cabinet, it does work well. However, it is still essentially particleboard with a nice suit, and it has the limitations of particleb
oard, one of which is lack of strength. A shelf of any material will eventually sag if it is long enough and bears excessive weight. How quickly it sags depends on the material used. Whenever one sees a chart on shelf span limits, particleboard is the one that sags first, which is understandable when one considers that it is formed from a pile of sawdust!
Bamboo, by way of contrast, is every bit as strong as maple, but simply grinding it up into sawdust would make it no better, and no stronger, really, than the particleboard already mentioned.
Simply cobbling those spindly tubes together works well for primitive rafts and huts, but what we really need, if we can get it, is some form of plywood made of bamboo that is every bit as strong as the bamboo from which it is made. That would be the ideal solution.
NEXT: "The Ideal Solution"
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