Engineered lumber is manufactured by binding together the strands, particles, fibers, or veneers of wood, together with adhesives, to form composite materials. These products are engineered to precise design specifications which are tested to meet national or international standards. Engineered lumber can be used in nearly any application where dimensional lumber has been traditionally used.
It’s generally accepted that engineered lumber is a net positive for the environment mainly because the entire tree is used in manufacturing. Regular lumber has a waste factor of over 30% from tree to milled piece. Eliminating this waste alone reduces the need to cut more trees.
Engineered lumber might also help our environment just by being stronger in most applications than a comparable sized piece of dimensional lumber. Engineered lumber’s superior ability to withstand stresses that lead to warping and bending helps designers to build stronger structures using less raw materials.
LVL (Laminated Veneer Lumber) is a veneer-based composite, produced by bonding thin wood veneers together so that the grain of all veneers is parallel to the long direction. LVL is most widely used, particularly in header and beam applications. LVL is also used in hip and valley rafters, scaffold planking, and the flange (or edge material) in prefabricated wood I-joists.
PSL (Parallel Strand Lumber) consists of long veneer strands (fibers) laid in parallel and bonded together with an adhesive. Like LVL and glulams, PSL is used for beam and header applications where high bending strength is needed. PSL is also frequently used as load bearing columns.
OSL (Oriented Strand Lumber) is made from flaked wood strands that have a high length-to-thickness ratio (they are much longer than they are thick). OSL is used in a variety of applications from studs to millwork components.
Rather than being manufactured from full veneers, LSL (Laminated Strand Lumber) uses smaller veneers, and so is similar to oriented strand board (OSB) in appearance, though much stronger. Most of our LSL goes into rim board applications.
You can learn more about properties and the strength of LVL, PSL and LSL HERE.
Glulam (Glued Laminated Timber) is among the most versatile of our engineered wood products. Glulam is used in a wide variety of applications, including headers, floor girders, ridge beams and purlins, cantilever beam systems, arches, domes and exposed applications.
Glulam is an engineered stress-rated product created by bonding together individual layers of lumber having a thickness of no more than two inches. Individual pieces of lumber in these layers are finger-jointed together, and then bonded together along their lengths to create the finished product. By laminating several smaller pieces of timber, a single large, strong, structural member is manufactured from smaller pieces.
Although I-Joists are an inexpensive solution for your floors, they’re definitely not ‘cheap’. Although the central web of an I-Joist might look like regular OSB, it is not. If you rub your hand across OSB you’ll find the texture to be loose compared to the tighter structure of an I-Joist. Total I-Joists are designed to meet the load requirements of your job and are a great solution for many, if not most applications.
