This is Forest to Frame, where we explore how restoring forests creates beautiful spaces. A podcast dedicated to conversations with industry leaders, shaping the future of the forest industry. And now, here's your host, Russ Vaagen

Hi everybody, Russ here with the Forest to Frame podcast. Today, I want to talk to you a little bit about glulam, Glulam beams, what are they? And how do they figure into mass timber? Well, mass timber is a number of things. Primarily when people talk about mass timber, they think about cross laminated timber. There's been a product that's been around for a long time that is mass timber and is included in mass timber buildings, even with CLT, and that is Glulam. The other products that are out there are dowel laminated timber, nail laminated timber, and mass plywood panels. And there might be a few others that people might wanna consider to be mass timber. But that's primarily what we're talking about. We're talking about the structure and elements of the buildings being some sort of laminated or adhered mass timber, which is just lumber put together basically. And I've got a few pieces of glulam here. So this is a two by four glulam. You can see there, it's just two by four stacked together, glued together nicely. This is a product sample we have. It's got our logo on it and description. But the product is finger jointed together. These are shorter pieces of lumber that are then, I don't know if you can see that there, but there is a finger joint and that there ties the pieces together. anywhere from four foot pieces up to 20 foot pieces, glue them together and make them into a long piece, glue the whole thing together and you have yourself a beam or a column. This is a two by four, like I said. This is one of our early pieces. This was standard three and an eighth inch. Now we produce three and a half inch. Why might we do that? We do that because three and a half inch is the same size as your standard 2x4 framing. And so when you're putting in a beam and aligning it with your framing, this fits. You don't have to shim it. There's no change in the size. So like if you're in a garage, you have 2x4 framing, and you set a garage door header, woo lamp for the span to hold the structure up. It's now the same size. And then we have here, two by sixes, much the same. So this is just a bigger block here of lumber stuck together. These are both Douglas fir, and they're just, again, glued together. And also, we produce this now in a three and a half. And this, excuse me, five and a half. And we used to produce this in five and an eighth, but we still can for mass timber projects. And it's a it's a big deal, because that allows you to align your traditional building and a lot of these, a lot of mass timber products aren't only mass timber buildings. They have mass timber components, blue lamps, sometimes CLT, sometimes other products that go into the home that go along with maybe a stick frame construction. I think we've all seen that where you've got big blue lamps in the ceiling, tongue and groove decking over the top that's similar to what we have in this office. And that's a pretty traditional way of using it. But now when you're framing, you can now have the same size glulam as you do with your framing. So it just makes sense and it works. And we're producing a lot of that for the market now. We learned how to do it in our mass timber builds. So that was where we were doing CLT and glulam. And now we've started offering that quality of the marketplace, the distribution lumber yards to use that same blue lamb. Because primarily in the past, there's really been two grades of lumber, or excuse me, grades of blue lamb, industrial and architectural grade. And what we found is the architectural grade, albeit pretty nice, there were some consistent glaring blemishes, big knot holes, a lot of places where putty had to be put in to fill those blemishes. And it doesn't look horrible, but it can be better. And in our mass timber builds are all going to be exposed. So we wanted to make sure they look beautiful. And So we do that, we are trying to minimize any filler or repairs that need to be made. So we're using a little bit better quality lumber. But what does that mean and why is it important? Well, if you go to your lumber, your contractor goes to the lumber distribution company and picks up their package of lumber and glulam for, let's say a ski chalet that's gonna have nice exposed heavy beams. If those beams have a big not that's filled with putty and then the design of that home is to be a dark stain on the wood that putty is going to be totally different color than the dark state and. That. doesn't have to be that way, so what we have now started offering is what we call a premium grade blue lamb to the marketplace, which is our mass timber blue lamb that is. three and a half, five and a half inches wide, that is a premium grade. Now, we also do the other grades with more of an industrial look, but we try to share that with our customers. People think the architectural is the highest you can get, and really from a grade standpoint, it is. But there are opportunities and we're helping create those to create a premium glue lamp that can go into a traditionally built home or small commercial building or, you know, any building for that matter. It's something you're gonna be proud to show off because the wood looks great. We actually think there's opportunity to disrupt the way we fix the wood. I personally don't like the putty just I think it's a I think it's a short-sighted way to fix what looks like a blemish in the wood. If you look at high-end distressed oak flooring now, one of the popular things to do is to fill any of those blemishes or burls or whatever with a black epoxy and highlight it. The other thing is I'd just leave that wood raw. If there's a little bit of a blemish there, it doesn't really matter. It looks great anyway. You can fill it with a clear epoxy or you could do almost anything with it, but I just think we need to look at it differently. When I traveled to Europe to look at the mass timber buildings they were doing, they're doing a very focused repair job of wood with wood. and it just looks fantastic. They have built a set of repair size pieces, and then they've got a router system that goes and plunges out the wood that that particular patch goes into. They put a little glue on it, press it into place, take a wood or a rubber mallet and tap it down to where it's nice and flush, and then it goes out and It looks like it's all wood. We aren't quite there yet. We do have some ways of building round plugs for holes and certain things like that, but we still have a ways to go. But I do think there's an opportunity for our industry to pick up the quality of the way we fix our mass timber, especially if it's going to be exposed. And it's glulam is finding its way into all kinds of markets now. And so it's kind of a cool thing, because glulam has always been around, you've probably seen a beautiful wood lodge or some building with glulam in there. But now, glulam is getting even more opportunity to shine in the building materials and built environment, because mass timber jobs need the glulam to be the structure. So it becomes the post and the beams, and then the CLT panels go on top of that and up on the walls. And Yeah, it's just a really complimentary product. And we're fortunate enough to be able to produce both of those, the Glulam and the CLT. So I just wanted to point out some of the sizing and quality differences that you can see out there in Glulam. Mass timber is not only cross laminated timber or CLT, it encompasses a lot of products. And We're excited and fortunate to be in this business and to offer these products to the marketplace. It's exciting to go to new places and visit with clients and really show them something even more beautiful than they thought was possible. That's an exciting, fulfilling part of what we're doing. And even better than that, we can share where that wood comes from. And we're working on a number of things that are going to allow us to tell that story even more rapidly. At some point in the future, a QR code or some sort of RFID might go with the structure and be able to tell that story rapidly. So if you go into a building and it's a mass timber building, there might be an interactive spot there where you can use your cell phone and you can go up and get the QR code, take you to a website, tell you the whole story of where that building was sourced and how it came together. And more and more people are becoming interested in those things, and it becomes an important part, tells that entire story, and ties together the entire circular economy with natural products that a lot of people in our communities get to work on. So we're really excited about that. Really appreciate you watching the Forced Frame podcast, and look forward to seeing you soon.

Russ Vaagen

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