Particle board vs. plywood: the first follow up
OK, on Monday I wrote a put up and specified my plans for locating out what takes place while a six inch by means of six inch pattern of 3/4" veneer plywood and a six with the aid of six pattern of laminated a hundred sixty five lb. Particle board get dumped in water and left for a few days.
The water immersion a part of this check ended the previous day and earlier than I get to what I've determined to date, permit me country a couple of factors. For starters, in case your cabinetry finally ends up floating in water for more than one days, how well it will hold up is the least of your troubles. So the percentages of immersion are slender at quality. Secondly, this isn't a systematic test via any way nor are the findings that comply with a few kind of a sweeping indictment or endorsement of those products' classes. All this check does do is test a droop I had approximately those very precise samples. OK, with that out of the way, permit's get to it.
On Sunday morning at 11:15, I dropped this sample
and this pattern into two separate bowls packed with 3 liters of faucet water.
It turned into 73 stages and sunny on that nice morning and here's what the samples appeared like when they first went into their watery graves.
So I went about my day and waited to look what would manifest. I knew they'd be first-class for the primary couple of hours and positive enough they were. I fished out my samples and photographed them at 15 minute intervals for the primary hour. Then I photographed them again at hours, four hours, six hours and 12 hours. I might not bore you through displaying you all of this but in case you actually need to peer exactly what these samples gave the impression of at any of those intervals, I'll gladly ship you the pics. OK, moving on.
On Monday morning, I fished them out and this is what I noticed on the 24 hour mark.
Both samples were still quite intact. The laminate at the particle board had commenced to to blister a bit bit and its once easy floor felt almost like an orange peel.
The plywood appeared to be faring higher.
Though a number of the veneer had started to delaminate. Neither sample had warped.
At forty eight hours things have been a touch changed but nothing in reality dramatic.
This is the plywood's edgebanded facet. It's nevertheless quite intact and hasn't warped.
This is the particle board's edgebanded facet. The particle board's now not faring as well as the plywood, however I predicted that. It's still now not warped however it is approximately a sixteenth of an inch fatter than it changed into forty eight hours earlier than.
From the facet, the plywood seemed like this. There's a touch veneer delamination going on but for the most component it is still intact.
And this is the aspect of the particle board. Pretty an awful lot the complete floor now has that orange peel texture from the man or woman wood particles swelling.
At 72 hours I pulled the samples out of the water for the final time.
The particle board suffered the most.
This is the threshold, fresh from the drink. The side tape appears to have held the shelf together and the water were given in via the seams along the higher and lower surfaces.
The aspect's pretty chewed up too. If you click on in this picture it will make bigger and you could get a higher sense for the orange peel texture this factor's adopting.
The plywood behaved a little better after seventy two hours.
This is the threshold of the plywood pattern.
And right here's its aspect. You can see some of the veneer effervescent alongside the left part.
You also can see a seam wherein portions of veneer join up. That's the road approximately 2/3 of the way up the pattern.
All in all, this was nowhere near as dramatic as I expected it to be. And frankly, I thought the particle board would hold up better. The plywood's pretty unusable at this point too. I mean, any finished wood that's thrown in water for 72 hours will be toast. Despite that though, I expected both samples to be in far worse shape than they are. That's a good finding.
But we're not done yet. Each of these samples absorbed a fair amount of water over the course of this test and they are both drying out as I type this. As the absorbed water evaporates, the samples will start to shrink.
That my friends is phase two. What do you suppose will happen now? Once either of these engineered products endures a 72 hour flood, what do you think happens? Will either of them still be viable? The humidity's been pretty low so they'll dry out in a couple of days. I will photograph them one last time after they've dried. What wonders await I wonder wonder wonder?