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Engineered Wood Flooring

Prefinished Brand Names We Carry:
Armstrong, APC Cork, Baltic Wood, Bruce, BR111, Hawa Bamboo, Homerwood, Johnson, Kahrs, Lauzon, Master's Choice, Mercier, Mohawk, Mirage, Mullican, Nature, Oshkosh Design, Preverco, Shaw, Tarkett, Trangulo Engineered and more. 

Engineered wood flooring is composed of two or more layers of wood in the form of a plank. The top layer (lamella) is the wood that is visible when the flooring is installed, and is adhered to the core (or substrate) which provides the stability.

Laminate, vinyl and veneer floors are often confused with engineered wood floors - laminate uses an image of wood on its surface, vinyl is plastic formed to look like wood, and veneer uses a thin layer of wood with a core that could be one of a number of different composite wood products (most commonly, high density fibreboard).

Engineered wood is the most common type of wood flooring used globally. North America is the only continent that has a larger solid wood market than engineered, although engineered wood is quickly catching up in market share.

Lamella
The lamella is the face layer of the wood that is visible when installed. Typically it is a sawn piece of timber.

The timber can be cut in three different styles: flat-sawn, quarter-sawn, and rift-sawn. However, because only one side of the wood is visible on flooring, "quarter-sawn" and "rift-sawn" will have the same appearance.

The Core / Substrate
1) Wood ply construction ("sandwich core"): Uses multiple thin plies of wood adhered together. The wood grain of each ply runs perpendicular to the ply below it. Stability is attained from using thin layers of wood that have little to no reaction to climatic change. The wood is further stabilized due to equal pressure being exerted lengthwise and widthwise from the plies running perpendicular to each other.

2) Finger core construction: Finger core engineered wood floors are made of small pieces of milled timber that run perpendicular to the top layer (lamella) of wood. They can be 2-ply or 3-ply, depending on their intended use. If it is three ply, the third ply is often plywood that runs parallel to the lamella. Stability is gained through the grains running perpendicular to each other, and the expansion and contraction of wood is reduced and relegated to the middle ply, stopping the floor from gapping or cupping.

3) Fibreboard: The core is made up of medium or high density fibreboard. Fibreboard has minimal expansion and contraction so the core is very stable. Due to the softer nature of fibreboard, wood floors with a thin lamella or veneer are more prone to denting. Fibreboard is less expensive than timber but is not VOC free and is not environmentally friendly.