FLOORING
PROGRESSIVE FLOORING: LESS CARPENTRY, MORE ENGINEERING
01 Despite the continual development of new building materials and designs, the construction of suspended floors in the housing sector is still dominated by one material: wood. David Connacher, Marketing Manager at Norbord Europe, illustrates why.
44
w
Admittedly, modern timber suspended floors are a far cry from the traditional combination of sawn joists and nailed planks, but natural timber’s inherent strength and lightness continues to make this the material of choice for most builders. Solid timber components long ago ceased to be the norm. Solid joists and planks must be sawn from large and expensive timbers; today’s engineered wood products are manufactured by jointing and bonding smaller cuts. Modern manufacturing not only makes better use of a raw material that was previously unsuitable for structural
STRUCTURALTIMBERMAGAZINE.CO.UK
purposes – it can also result in a high quality and more reliable product. Instead of the traditional 9" sawn softwood joists from the local timber merchants, builders can now choose from a variety of composite structural beams that employ the same web-andflange configuration as a hot-rolled steel beam. With flanges of softwood and webs of either oriented-strand board or a pressed steel lattice, these beams are as light – or even lighter – than a solid timber beam and just as strong. Crucially, these engineered products are free of the defects, such as knots,
