Vent: guy at the lumber yard told me I was ruining my plywood

Some old timer at the supply house in Tacoma watched me load Baltic birch and said I was stacking it wrong because I didn't put stickers between every sheet. I've been building cabinets for 12 years and never had a warp issue lol. Has anyone else had old timers give totally unsolicited advice on basic stuff?

2 comments

2 Comments

lisa_grant13d ago

and actually he might have had a point about the stickers but probably not for the reason he thought. Baltic birch is pretty stable but if you're stacking a bunch of sheets on a flat dolly or something in a humid shop, air flow matters more than anything. I've seen guys stack 20 sheets of regular ply with no stickers and they're fine, then someone leaves a stack on a concrete floor overnight and it's a mess. The real trick is just making sure your stack is level and not sitting on damp ground. Been doing cabinets for 15 years and I've had more warps from bad storage than from stacking without stickers.

jade3213d ago

@lisa_grant nailed it honestly. The concrete floor thing is real, I've seen way more damage from that than missing stickers. People get so hung up on the old school way of doing things they forget the actual physics of it lol. Baltic birch is basically armored plywood anyway, you'd have to try pretty hard to warp a decent stack of it. Just keep it dry and level and you're good.