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Component Manufacturing dverti$ dverti $ er
By Mike Weber
Don’t Forget! You Saw it in the
Adverti$$er
December 2021 #13269 Page #112
How CLT and Mass Timber Technologies May Revolutionize Skyscapes
ver the last decade — in outlets reaching from construction industry journals to the Boston Globe and the Economist; from CNN and Fast Company to Popular Mechanics; to Nautilus and TED talks — we’ve been hearing increasingly about mass timber and related phenomena: “CLT,” big wood, tall wood, tall timber, timber towers, ply-rises, plyscrapers, ply in the sky, super-ply, Brobdingnagian boards, and all manner of engineered arboreal futures.
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So what’s the huge deal about mass timber? What on earth’s so good about wood? Is CLT the new CBD (for builders, that is)? Can ply really get that high? Is this just a big buncha buzz, or is something more solid behind it? Excellent questions. Keep reading …
The Skinny on Mass Timber — Some ABCs of CLT, NLT, MPP, SCL, EWP, etc. First of all, what the heck is mass timber, anyway? A few short and very general definitions may be in order. When people speak of mass timber, they don’t merely mean that a structure has wood framing. They don’t even mean using lots and lots of wood in your construction projects. If that were the case, virtually every sizable residential development encompassing more than a few individual lots would count as mass timber construction. Mass timber means something more specific and, at least for the time being, something considerably more specialized. Mass timber construction basically means the use of Cross-laminated timber blocks. large, prefabricated slabs or panels of engineered wood Photo Credit: Oregon Forest Resources Institute products (EWP) for walls, floors, diaphragms, roofs, and more in the design and construction of buildings. (“Diaphragm” in this context refers to a flat structural unit, usually horizontal, creating a partition between spaces, as a floor-ceiling unit does
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