Comparison With Engineered Wood
Perhaps the greatest advantage of solid wood is that the wood is the same all the way through, so repairs are relatively easy. Repairs to veneer are much more difficult and sometimes impossible.
Solid wood furniture is strong enough to easily satisfy all furniture applications, and it can last for centuries. The jury is still out on whether furniture made of plywood (often made from pine) can do the same. Plywood and other engineered wood products used to make furniture are typically covered with a veneer such as Cherry.
Unfortunately, it is common today for furniture manufacturers and retailers to advertise such veneered plywood furniture as made of "wood solids with cherry veneers". Most customers naturally believe that to mean solid planks of less expensive woods such as poplar, etc., with expensive woods such as cherry used for veneers. However, "wood solids" is simply a term of art. The so-called "wood solids" are simply plywood, or another engineered wood product.
The Federal Trade Commission doesn't allow furniture to be advertised as made of "solid wood" unless all exposed surfaces are in fact solid wood. Solid wood is expensive. Engineered wood (often advertised as wood solids) is not.
Read more about this topic: Solid Wood
Famous quotes containing the words comparison and/or wood:
“We teach boys to be such men as we are. We do not teach them to aspire to be all they can. We do not give them a training as if we believed in their noble nature. We scarce educate their bodies. We do not train the eye and the hand. We exercise their understandings to the apprehension and comparison of some facts, to a skill in numbers, in words; we aim to make accountants, attorneys, engineers; but not to make able, earnest, great- hearted men.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“After sitting in my chamber many days, reading the poets, I have been out early on a foggy morning and heard the cry of an owl in a neighboring wood as from a nature behind the common, unexplored by science or by literature.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)