Laminates

Lamination and Laminates

Lamination is the process of bonding a sheet of material onto another material. Laminates are layers of thin material bonded together with adhesives. 

Plywood is a manufactured board. It is a good example of a laminated material. Plywood consists of a number of layers of thin wood sheets called veneers bonded together to form a board. Plywood always has an odd number of layers, one layer in the middle with one each side; this is 3 ply plywood. 5 ply plywood has one layer in the middle and 2 each side, 7 ply has one in the middle and 3 each side etc.

Sometimes a composite material such as chipboard, which has a plain appearance, has a thin sheet of another material laminated onto the surface to enhance its appearance or to improve its physical characteristics, e.g.

• chipboard may have a wood veneer laminate bonded to the surface to give it the appearance of solid timber.
• chipboard may have a plastic or stainless steel laminate bonded onto the surface so that it will be water resistant, easy to clean and so that it will be a suitable material for kitchen worktops

Complex curved shapes in timber are virtually impossible to produce without laminating timber or using a composite. This is because large sections of timber are very difficult to bend. The drawing  If the shape would be cut from a large piece of timber, it would lose much of its strength because the structure would consist of sections of "short grain".

Other laminates include:

• paper laminates, corrugated card laminates
• plastic laminates, fibre glass, carbon fibre, corrugated platic, plastic and fabric laminates; e.g. skis are made from a sandwich of a plastic base and top sheets with a core of wood, carbon fibre, kevlar, fibreglass, aluminium or titanium bonded topgether with epoxy resin.