Engineered Wood Floor Manufacturing

                        Engineered wood flooring is composed of two or more layers of wood in the form of a plank. The top layer (lamella) is the wood that is visible when the flooring is installed and is adhered to the core. The increased stability of engineered wood is achieved by running each layer at a 90° angle to the layer above. This stability makes it a universal product that can be installed over all types of subfloors above, below or on grade. Engineered wood is the most common type of wood flooring used globally.

There are several different categories of engineered wood flooring:

All timber wood floors are made from sawn wood and are the most common category of engineered wood flooring. They do not use rotary peeled veneer, composite wood (such as HDF), or plastic in their construction.

Veneer floors use a thin layer of wood over a core that is commonly a composite wood product.

Acrylic impregnated wood flooring uses a layer of wood that is impregnated with liquid acrylic then hardened using a proprietary process.

Laminate and vinyl floors are often confused with engineered wood floors, but are not—laminate uses an image of wood on its surface, while vinyl flooring is plastic formed to look like wood.

Lamella

The lamella is the face layer of the wood that is visible when installed. Typically, it is a sawn piece of timber. The timber can be cut in three different styles: flat-sawn, quarter-sawn, and rift-sawn. Keep in mind that each cut will give the board a different final appearance.

Core/substrate

1. Wood ply construction ("sandwich core"): Uses multiple thin plies of wood adhered together. The wood grain of each ply runs perpendicular to the ply below it. Stability is attained from using thin layers of wood that have little to no reaction to climatic change. The wood is further stabilized due to equal pressure being exerted lengthwise and widthwise from the plies running perpendicular to each other.
2. Finger core construction: Finger core engineered wood floors are made of small pieces of milled timber that run perpendicular to the top layer (lamella) of wood. They can be 2-ply or 3-ply, depending on their intended use. If it is three ply, the third ply is often plywood that runs parallel to the lamella. Stability is gained through the grains running perpendicular to each other, and the expansion and contraction of wood is reduced and relegated to the middle ply, stopping the floor from gapping or cupping.
3. Fibreboard: The core is made up of medium or high density fibreboard. Floors with a fibreboard core are hygroscpoic and must never be exposed to large amounts of water or very high humidity - the expansion caused from absorbing water combined with the density of the fibreboard, will cause it to lose its form. Fibreboard is less expensive than timber and can emit higher levels of harmful gases due to its relatively high adhesive content.
4. An engineered flooring construction which is popular in parts of Europe is the hardwood lamella, softwood core laid perpendicular to the lamella, and a final backing layer of the same noble wood used for the lamella. Other noble hardwoods are sometimes used for the back layer but must be compatible. This is thought by many to be the most stable of engineered floors.

Aesthetics

Engineered wood flooring is mainly industrially fabricated in the form of straight edged boards, with milled jointing profiles to provide for interconnecting of the boards. Such manufacturing is most cost efficient but leaves an industrial looking surface. In nature no straight lines exist; therefore there is a rising trend to modify the visual appearance to imitate it. In recent years numerous producers have been taking on the challenge of adding more natural aesthetics.

For instance - some manufacturers have come up with an idea to use, instead of straight edged boards, un-edged planks with wood trunk curvature. This method, although providing a natural looking design has the disadvantage of requiring a large amount of raw material. The lamellas which form are scanned by a computer and fitted together to match the forms of the following un-edged lamella. This method, although providing a natural looking design and using quite efficiently the raw material, makes this kind of flooring very expensive and unaffordable to the general public.

A method, developed and protected as intellectual property by engineered flooring producer  is milling the raw material in predefined amount of predefined forms inspired by nature, to form a system. The predefined forms are chosen so as to fit together with adjacent boards and adjacent systems; to provide for infinitely extendible surface covering composing of non-straight edged boards. This method provides unique nature inspired aesthetics while being industrially manufacturable with moderate costs to the consumer.