What Does Solid Wood Really Mean?
Buying wooden furniture can be a confusing and intimidating experience. We are often flooded with incoherent and misleading jargon. For example, terms such as MDF, LVL, particleboard, chipboard, fiberboard, plywood, ‘Real’ Wood, ‘Natural Wood’, ‘Laminate’, and ‘Veneer’ casually thrown around to make the furniture seem quality at the expense of anyone’s understanding.
Below are a few things that may help put power back into your hands by arming you with some quick tips and tricks to make sure what you are paying for is the absolute real deal.
What is Solid Wood?
Solid wood is an original woodcut from trees, brought straight from nature to your home. Before manufacturing methods made Engineered wood products such as plywood and chipboard more common in the old days, this was the only type of wood furniture. In modern times, however, solid wood furniture is increasingly a mark of luxury as most of the big, old trees that used to be abundant on our planet have been cut down, and the remaining ones marked for preservation and protection.
Then, What Isn’t Solid Wood?
Most wood products sold nowadays are not authentic solid wood but Engineered wood, which is a wood derivative. While they are made of wood because they contain wood, some products only include wood shavings or sawdust and are not solid wood.
But not all engineered woods are inadequate. Like all man-made materials such as plastic and fiberglass, there are varying tiers of quality, and Engineered woods also have their applications. There are various types of solid wood, and a piece of furniture made of high-quality MDF with a well-done solid wood veneer can look and feel just as good as a solid wood piece while, in some applications, even serving better.
So, how to tell the difference?
Many people try to knock on wood and rub it to try and figure out the composition and quality. While it’s the right idea to get your hands and eyes on the wood, it’s also important to know what to notice.
A few points to note will let you affirm what you are looking at. While high-quality imitations improve by the years, and it can sometimes be challenging to tell the difference, these tell-tale signs help determine the real deal.
The Form
Laminates and chipboard tend to be used for more flat surfaces and angular shapes. Even though the thin plastic is flexible and can be curved, the textures don’t line up as well on pieces with more complex forms, resulting in a compromised aesthetic.
Veneers are also tricky to work with when making rounded, curving shapes, as the flat pieces of wood are nearly impossible to bend without snapping. Smaller, finer details are economically unfeasible to recreate with veneer. If you see a piece with many smaller parts, such as a chair with a picket back containing multiple shafts, it’s much more probable to be solid wood.
The Weight
Most of the time, solid wood is weightier than engineered wood – but it is not always the case. Cheap alternates like particleboard can be easily detected by their lack of heft and substance, but other types like good quality plywood and fiberboard can feel as heavy and dense as solid wood. So the weight test isn’t conclusive – but can help you remove a few doubts.
The Finishing
In most solid wood types, you will be able to see the pores and imperfections on the wood surface. You can run your fingertip and/or fingernail gently over the surface to feel for resistance. If the surface is perfectly smooth and flat like plastic, you’re probably looking at a laminate surface over a chipboard or particleboard core. Laminate is often seen in lower-priced furniture and is the most inexpensive possible alternative.
The Visual
One way to tell real from artificial in this case is to check for the recurrence of patterns. If you find the pattern repeating in the same piece of furniture or across two pieces of furniture, there is a higher chance it is a laminate surface, as natural wood is always different plank to plank, tree to tree. The randomness of wood grain patterns is tricky to realistically fake. Some woods such as Walnut and Teak have more distinctive grain patterns. Other woods such as Oak tend towards a more popular choice to imitate.
Here at Myseatsg, we use Rubber and Pine primarily because we appreciate and want to showcase the natural beauty of the wood alongside others varieties such as Oak and Teak.
The Corners & Edges
Veneers have their limitations, nonetheless. Because they are flat pieces of wood, veneers cannot cover the entirety of a wood piece. Notably, it cannot readily bend around corners, and those are the best places to look for a seam where the two parts of the veneer meet. If the corner has a seam, it is not solid wood.
High-quality veneers use edge banding, making it incredibly challenging to distinguish from actual solid wood; it will take some effort and sharp eyes to spot the seam. Such a piece is likely to pass as a genuine solid wood in daily use.
This method of examination can quickly tell apart laminate from wood. However, the surface of a solid wood piece and an engineered wood core covered in a solid wood veneer are impossible to differentiate based on a quick once-over since they are effectively the same material (the veneer is a thin slice of natural wood over a different material, after all.)
Bear in mind that no approach is inevitable. Good quality should always speak for itself. If you are still unclear, feel free to head down to any of our Showrooms. We don’t believe in misleading or hard-selling and promise to be clear and transparent. We believe in the quality of our products – why else would we give you all that information?
Myseat.sg does not deal in smoke and mirrors, just good ol’ wood.
Shop your favorite solid wood collection today with us!
