Glulam Building: Start to Finish – Part Nine

 Welcome to our “Glulam Building: Start to Finish” series. Our goal is to provide an overview – from idea to completion – of a glulam building from the perspective of the glulam manufacturer and designer.

Part 9: Glulam Fabrication

After our brief trip to the steel shop for Part 8, we’re back to the glulam side of the factory. Now we will take the rough billets from Glulam Production and turn them into finished Glulam members.

Part 9A: Planing

A 70-1/2″ deep beam ready to be planed

In the glue room we created a solid block of wood large enough for our finished part, but it is quite rough around the edges. Plies don’t perfectly align with each other, and there is a lot of glue on the surface – both from the squeeze out and from general handling. We can clean this billet up significantly with a trip through our main planer. 

Our large, double sided planer will remove about 1/4″ – 3/8″ material from the wide sides of the glulam billet. This will completely remove all the glue squeezed out and even out the surface. We can fit billets that are just over 24″ x 76″ through our planer. It is truly a centerpiece of our plant, and marks the transition from our glue room to our finishing department.

The same 70-1/2″ deep beam after one pass through our planer

Planing vs sanding is actually an interesting consideration. Aesthetically, the two cannot be mixed on a wood surface – stain will take differently and light will reflect differently. With our large planer, we are primarily a planed finish facility – so all touch up work need to be finished by planing or scraping rather than sanding. If we know that part of a finished member will need to be sanded, then the entire surface typically gets sanded to match. Beam end are an exception to this – end grain will have a different texture anyways, and planing end grain isn’t practical.