Over the years we have supplied lumber and plywood to many companies working on some amazing millwork installations. Sometimes we just supply the materials, other times we run the millwork whether it be flooring, paneling, or moulding. Many times it just comes down to plywood for the panels. We pride ourselves on the quality of the plywood we sell and these high standards lead to a lot of repeat business and a lot of custom orders. Architectural plywood panels are of the highest quality with rock solid cores and only the finest face veneers. A very stable and well built core is a major part of the battle, but getting consistent quality in the face veneer to stretch across all the panels on a large project like a hotel or conference center is another story completely. Now add to the mixture the need for a custom design panel with an unusual species and you have a very tough project on your hands. Over the years of buying plywood we have built up a great network to help us source and construct custom laid up panels in a staggering variety of options.
Custom Plywood to meet your demands
Is performance and flatness your most important factor? How about the quality and appearance of the face veneers? Maybe both are important. Custom plywood is just that, custom. You can choose the combination of core and veneer to suit the application. The face veneers are what you see and the finished product relies heavily on the appearance. However you can lay the nicest Teak, Wenge, or Zebrawood veneer but if you put it on a lower quality core, an expensive replacement job is in your future when the panels warp or delaminate either during installation or even worse, months down the road. A quality panel comes from an outstanding manufacturing process where no corner is cut and consistent results can be counted on. In our experience buying and selling high quality plywood we have formed partnerships with manufacturers that go above and beyond when it comes to making a panel core. This way we can be certain we are matching beauty with durability and performance when the custom order comes to us.
You Want What for the Face Veneer?
We get some odd requests for face veneer species around here. Generally these custom requests are paired with a specific cut too like center matched bookmatch, or quartersawn that ups the ante just a bit more. We maintain a pretty standard inventory of species in our plywood inventory like Cherry, Maple, Sapele, Spanish Cedar, etc and we can ship those out within a few days. If your client or architect has specified something like Italian Olivewood or Koa then obviously that will take a little longer to source and get manufactured. Assuming the species isn’t endangered or so obscure that only 2 panels a year can be made, J Gibson McIlvain can get it made and delivered nationwide to your job site.
The point being that we have a network of folks we can turn to around the world to supply the veneer we need. Then we match it to the highest quality core for a superior end result.
Now that I’ve written this, I’ve opened the door for some really weird requests but we welcome the challenge and will do what we can to help you with the custom laid up panels for that one of a kind project.
What is the weirdest plywood you have encountered?
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