For the self-construction of our house, we had to use Glue Laminated Timber; we explain to you what it is for, what its advantages are and how it is made.
What Is Glulam Timbers?
So we could say to ourselves that it would be less work to use raw wood rather than assembling several small pieces of wood, but many things must be taken into account, which gives a lot of advantages.
Using rough wood of large sections makes it difficult not to have any defect on this piece (knots, cracks, bending, etc.), and it may be necessary to cut down several trees to find one that allows obtaining the large section.
By using several trees to make glulam, it is possible to obtain sections larger than those of the trees. The limits no longer depend on the size of the trees you use.
The larger a piece of wood, the longer it takes to dry. With really large pieces of wood, it takes a very long time to dry, so it is quicker to cut the wood into small pieces, dry it and then put it together to get a big, dry piece.
As the basic pieces are sorted and assembled once they are dry, it is easier to obtain very straight pieces of wood which do not bend, which would be much more complicated (if not impossible) with a single raw piece.
What Is Glulam Timbers Used For?
As we have just seen, the Glue Laminated Timber can have really very large sections. You can easily find sections greater than 100x500mm in lengths greater than 10m.
In large-scale projects, it is often found in non-standard dimensions; some projects use glulam more than 100m long! For example, the Poitiers stadium uses 127m pieces of glulam!
Thanks to the large spans, Glue Laminated Timber is often used in large buildings such as stores (look up the next time you go shopping in a large area, you will surely see some).
But at the level of the individual and the individual house, it is also very useful. In this case, this timber can be used for the main beams of our wooden slab, but you can also use it for your frame. In the case of a frame, this is often used for the various purlins and allows to have a single piece of wood that rests on each gable of the house, even with rather long lengths (10-15m).
- The first step is to select wood with as few defects as possible: knots, cracks, etc., which are cut into identical sections, fairly small, around 3-4cm thick. This is called the lamellae. These strips must be very dry, and since they are not very thick, it goes relatively quickly.
- Once the long lengths of Glulam Timbers have been obtained by the butting, it is necessary to move on to the second part: the thickness. The strips are glued, then stacked and pressed. Depending on the desired thickness, more or fewer slats will be added.
Wrapping Up
In a nutshell, Glued laminated timber is an assembly of several pieces of wood to form a much larger and/or much longer piece of wood.