Particle board vs. plywood: the first follow up

OK, on Monday I wrote a post and detailed my plans for finding out what happens when a six inch by six inch sample of 3/4" veneer plywood and a six by six sample of laminated 165 lb. particle board get dumped in water and left for a few days.

The water immersion part of this test ended yesterday and before I get to what I've observed so far, let me state a couple of things. For starters, if your cabinetry ends up floating in water for a couple of days, how well it's going to hold up is the least of your problems. So the odds of immersion are slim at best. Secondly, this is not a scientific experiment by any means nor are the findings that follow some kind of a sweeping indictment or endorsement of these products' categories. All this test does do is test a hunch I had about these very specific samples. OK, with that out of the way, let's get to it.

On Sunday morning at 11:15, I dropped this sample

and this sample into two separate bowls filled with three liters of tap water.

It was 73 degrees and sunny on that fine morning and here's what the samples looked like when they first went into their watery graves.

So I went about my day and waited to see what would happen. I knew they'd be fine for the first couple of hours and sure enough they were. I fished out my samples and photographed them at 15 minute intervals for the first hour. Then I photographed them again at two hours, four hours, six hours and 12 hours. I won't bore you by showing you all of this but if you really want to see exactly what these samples looked like at any of those intervals, I'll gladly send you the images. OK, moving on.

On Monday morning, I fished them out and this is what I saw at the 24 hour mark.

Both samples were still pretty intact. The laminate on the particle board had started to to blister a little bit and its once smooth surface felt almost like an orange peel.

The plywood seemed to be faring better.

Though some of the veneer had begun to delaminate. Neither sample had warped.

At 48 hours things were a little changed but nothing really dramatic.

This is the plywood's edgebanded side. It's still pretty intact and hasn't warped.

This is the particle board's edgebanded side. The particle board's not faring as well as the plywood, but I expected that. It's still not warped but it's about a sixteenth of an inch fatter than it was 48 hours before.

From the side, the plywood looked like this. There's a little veneer delamination going on but for the most part it's still intact.

And this is the side of the particle board. Pretty much the entire surface now has that orange peel texture from the individual wood particles swelling.

At 72 hours I pulled the samples out of the water for the last time.

The particle board suffered the most.

This is the edge, fresh from the drink. The edge tape seems to have held the shelf together and the water got in through the seams along the upper and lower surfaces.

The side's pretty chewed up too. If you click on this photo it will expand and you can get a better feel for the orange peel texture this thing's adopting.

The plywood behaved a little better after 72 hours.

This is the edge of the plywood sample.

And here's its side. You can see some of the veneer bubbling along the left edge.

You can also see a seam where two pieces of veneer meet up. That's the line about 2/3 of the way up the sample.

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?

What IS the state of the art?

The brilliant and stunning Nancie Mills-Pipgras from Mosaic Art Now sent me a link yesterday. This isn't unusual, people send me links all the time.  As is usually the case, Nancie's link was designed to get a rise out of me. Well, a rise is precisely what she got.

Check this out. The image at the top of this post is the newly re-designed lobby of the President Hotel in Times Square. The link from Nancie took me to the website of Interior Design magazine and a profile of this hotel's renovation. The President Hotel is Best Western's flagship property and they spent 15 million dollars to have 334 rooms, a fitness center, a business center, a conference facility and a lobby redesigned by the New York firm Stonehill and Taylor.

Stonehill and Taylor chose the two party political system of the United States as its theme and in a lot of ways theirs is a successful design. Successful in the sense that they managed to celebrate US politics as an idea, rather than the acrimonious practice it is. It's also successful because I had an interior design magazine to explain the theme to me. If I found myself in the lobby of The President Hotel without knowing what I was looking at I'd probably turn around and walk out.

Clever is one thing, but when clever comes at the expense of a harmonious interior I have to draw the line.

I can appreciate the thought that went into this, really. But at the same time, really? Am I missing something?

I've been thinking a lot about echo chambers lately. By being in an echo chamber I mean that someone so afflicted spends all his time listening to his own voice and voices that sound just like his. It's an easy rut to fall into. Who wants to listen to criticism or dissent? But life in an echo chamber gives anyone who spends too much time in one a pretty skewed view of the world. I get it that the grillwork in the lobby is a deconstructed US flag, but that lobby is not somewhere I'd like to hang out. I mean, how could anyone sleep in those bedrooms?

What do you guys think? Too advanced for a simple man like me to understand? Or is this an example of too much time spent in an echo chamber? Would you spend $389 for a Saturday night in one of those rooms? Tell me things.

Happy anniversary to me

I started this blog two years ago today. 878 posts later I'm still at it. Thank you for your kind indulgence and great company.

More great papers from Given Campbell

Last week I ran a series of wallpaper designs the great and talented Given Campbell cooked up to express her displeasure with Pat Robertson's latest appalling statement. Given came up with that design when she and I were batting ideas back and forth on Facebook the night previously. Mind you, she came up with that at one in the morning two days before she got married. Now that's what I call a commitment to one's art. Wow.

I've been meaning to write some more about the rest of Given's work for some time and now's as good an opportunity as ever. Given Campbell is a self-taught wallpaper artist and she works alone in a two-room studio in Tampa, FL. Given is the real deal, she's a fine artist by training and she channels that history and passion into her work in wallpaper.

Given's wallpapers are hand made, this is the real deal. She has a large library of stock patterns and takes on requests for custom patterns with enthusiasm. Her work's been featured in such publications as InStyle, Domino, Metropolitan Home, Real Simple, The New York times and too many more to list here. Given Campbell is an artist and an entrepreneur and I'm glad to be able to call her a friend. Spend some time on her website and follow her on Twitter. You'll see what I mean. 

Particle board vs. plywood: an experiment

I get asked a lot of questions about the relative merits of cabinetry constructed with a particle board box as opposed to cabinetry constructed with a plywood box. I find that most people who ask that question are looking for me to agree with whatever their opinion is so I don't argue. It's a topic like religion or politics in a lot of ways. I have my opinions of course and I know what I think is right, but in the interest of peace (and commerce) I keep my mouth shut and nod my head yes.

Some people really, honestly want to know what I think and my usual answer is that plywood construction isn't an automatic indicator of quality or superiority. I tell people that each method has its positives and each has its negatives. Left to my own devices I use both, depending on the job at hand. Particle board tends to cost less and if I can't see it (in the case of a drawer base) why spend the money? Plywood is lighter and can be altered in the field better. See? Each has a strength and a purpose.

Now when I talk about particle board and plywood, I'm talking about the grades of those materials used in better cabinetry. I can't vouch for the inferior versions of those materials because I never deal with them. By better grades I'm talking about 3/4" veneer plywood and 3/4" 165 lb. furniture board that's pressure laminated with a PVC film. Each of those materials carries the same lifetime warranty so I assume they're of equal quality. Further, because the 165 lb. furniture board is held together with solvent-based glues, I've always believed it to be more resistant to water. In fact, I've been told by more cabinetry reps than I can count that it is in fact, more water-resistant than plywood.

When pressed, that's my opinion on the topic, but I have to say that I've never actually tested either of those materials nor have I ever read of such a study. I've always wanted to test it for myself and this week, that's exactly what I'm going to do.

Yesterday at 11:15am, I took a six-inch by six-inch square of 3/4" veneer plywood and a six by six square of laminated particle board and I dropped each of them in a bowl of water.

I've been fishing them out and photographing them at regular intervals and the results have been interesting. I'm going to let them soak for a couple of days and then write everything up in a separate post some time later this week.

In the meantime, anybody care to venture a guess about how this will end up? What do you think happens when these materials get wet? I had all kinds of assumptions about how this would go and so far most of them have been wrong. Who wants to go out on a limb here?