Why would you cut perfectly good timber up just to glue it back together?
Valid question… here’s a few reasons why we do it.
- Removing the defects from the timber creates a far stronger product. This also reduces the likelihood of the timber twisting or moving as it ages providing a straighter end product.
- We then cut fingers on the ends of the shook, apply an industrial strength glue and push them together providing a uniform length timber blank ready to be machined at the next stage of the process.
- What about the glue, how strong is that I hear you ask – the glue and finger joint is stronger than the timber itself. As part of our manufacturing process for a structural product, we have to test the strength of the joins under a huge amount of pressure and the timber itself will fail before the joins will.
- As an added bonus when we finger joint the product we indent a unique batch number to each piece allowing us to trace each piece back to a supplier even when in its finished form.
Keep a look out for the next part of the process where we look at creating the tooling to machine these blanks into their finished profiles.