December 2020 by Pat Traynor
I've been looking for a source for decent birch plywood. I figured I'd give National Lumber a try even though they're a bit of a drive for me. When I got there, I wasn't sure what was where, so I drove in between the large lumber warehouses looking around. A bearded guy came out and asked if he could help. I told him what I was looking for, so he jumped into a forklift and brought down a stack of 3/4" birch plywood for me to examine. It looked great, so I drove over to the main office to pay for a few sheets. When I walked back to my car, bearded guy was there, leaning on his forklift, and my three sheets had already been loaded into my trailer.Amazing service is one thing, but my purpose was to find decent wood. I've had a good deal of experience buying "hardwood" plywood that looked great coming off the shelf, but it would turn out that the hardwood veneer face was paper thin, and not very well glued to the lower layers once you got away from the factory cut edges. And when I'd cut them down, the veneer would be pulling away for inches from the cut and I'd have to do a lot of glue repairs. So I was nervous when I made my first cut into this plywood.Wow.The surface veneers are the better part of 1/16" thick and board is well glued, through and through. It's 9 ply, and while there is a "good" and a "bad" side, the bad side has no football patches. Just a few small knots that show up and would actually look fine if visible on a piece of furniture. There *are* voids, but they're few and far between.Absolutely thrilled that I made the drive.
