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Old 7th Apr 2014, 8:05 pm   #1
Dickie
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Default First use of plywood?

I have a home-built TRF that appears to be based on the Scott-Taggart ST400 of 1932. But the case is clearly constructed from plywood. So have I got a modern repro. , or was plywood common in the 1930's ( and earlier) ?
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Old 7th Apr 2014, 8:56 pm   #2
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Default Re: First use of plywood?

I've seen acoustic gramophones made from ply so being ply per se doesn't mean it's a repro.
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Old 8th Apr 2014, 8:34 am   #3
60 oldjohn
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Default Re: First use of plywood?

According to Wikipedia 8 x4 Plywood was being used in the USA in 1928 as a building material, smaller pieces were being made in the mid 1800s. The first veneer machine was patented in 1797.

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Old 8th Apr 2014, 8:40 am   #4
Mike Phelan
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Default Re: First use of plywood?

I've seen clock cases made using plywood no later than 1910.

Like most ply it was made from birch with a veneer on the outside layer like mahogany or walnut.
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Old 8th Apr 2014, 9:09 am   #5
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Default Re: First use of plywood?

Any time since the industrial revolution veneer cutting knives and presses were possible. I suspect it was the availability of a good glue that was the enabling technology for good plywood. And at first, it would have been an expensive and exotic material, becoming fairly commonplace by the nineteen teens.

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Old 8th Apr 2014, 10:06 am   #6
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Default Re: First use of plywood?

Veneering, and thus 'plywood', is as older than the furniture industry itself - the Egyptians can still teach us a thing or two. Plywood really came to the fore with steam bending and water resistant animal glues in the late 19thC and in WW2 with development of resin glues which enabled the Mosquito to be mass produced. The original Marcos sports car was built on a plywood chassis, while the BPBC fast motor launches of WW2 used multiple veneered plys and crossed timbers. The finest plywood is still birch aeroplane or furniture grade multiply of uniformly thick plies. Sadly most 'plywood' is a thinly veneered core of non-descript c**p timber. You pays for what you get!

The term WBP by the way refers only to the water-proof resin glue, while BS Marine ply is both waterproof resin glue and marine larva resistant.

Most 'commercial' veneers are indeed rotary cut (peeled like a toilet roll) while crown-cut decorative veneers are sliced off a baulk of timber; in days of old - and still for reproduction carved oak furniture - it was sawn to around 1/8" - 1/4" using a specially tapered narrow-tipped circular rip-saw blades to minimise waste (saw-dust from the kerf). Even very high pressure water jets have been, and still are, used to slice extremely thin veneers, especially of softer materials.

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Old 8th Apr 2014, 6:45 pm   #7
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Default Re: First use of plywood?

Thanks all for your comments. If it was used for clock cases in 1910 then no doubt it would be cheap enough for radio cabinets for the home constructor by 1920/25. The cabinet bears a strong resemblance to pictures I have seen in magazines of the period, so I shall assume for the time being it is vintage.
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Old 9th Apr 2014, 10:51 am   #8
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Default Re: First use of plywood?

Plywood is not cheap when compared to solid timber. Indeed, furniture grade ply is expensive (block board is even more expensive).

The beauty of plywood in cabinet making is three fold:

- it makes most economic use of exotic timbers as a finishing veener and it covers large areas more quickly, and thus cheaply, than sawn matchboard, especially where not seen
- it makes the most economic use of low grade forest timbers (all plywood is now imported)
- it is more easily steam bent and mouldable through laminating, than solid timber which can split in steam bending. 1920/30s radio were curvaceous

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Old 9th Apr 2014, 6:37 pm   #9
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Default Re: First use of plywood?

In the 1950's when timber was still scarce and expensive, my late father used to make bedside cabinets from the plywood cases of old radios. Our next-door neighbour was a semi-retired rag-and-bone man who used to get a steady supply of old radios (and what I now realise were projection TV's). He would break the non-working ones up for the scrap metal, and let my father have the odd working one and the valves, passive components, and cabinets of the scrappers. My mother still has a bathroom cabinet made from a curvy radio case, and I have one in my garage, still covered with 1950's "Fablon".

I well remember a battery portable which had a double skin plywood case with the aerial wound beween the two skins. It defied all my father's attempts to dismantle it into its constituent sheets, and it was so strong that we used it for some years as a chopping block for chopping firewood on. I was only young at the time and do not recall the make.
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