Sunday, May 16, 2010

Shredded bamboo strips compressed with resin to make engineered lumber of unique sizes.

Cali Bamboo, retailer of bamboo fencing products now sells a dimensional product which they call lumboo.  The sizes are different from wood lumber.  The lumboo 4 x 4 is three inches by three inches while a wooden 4 x 4 is 3.5 inches by 3.5 inches.

The resulting product is much heavier than wood.  A piece of lumboo 3 inches by 3 inches and 8 feet long weighs 25 pounds while a piece of wood lumber that size would weigh around 17.5 pounds.

According to Cali Bamboo, the lumboo lumber will resist termites due to the silicates found in bamboo and is so hard that nails cannot penetrate it.  Instead screws must be used.

To make lumboo, bamboo is shredded, arranged for maximum strength, coated with resin and then subjected to hundreds of thousands of pounds of pressure in a hydraulic press.

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