Plywood Uses, a List for Dummies

Construction of plywood

Call us crazy, call us pedantic... but we think that when someone asks you to detail the "Uses of Plywood,"¹ you should come up with some sort of list of, well, uses. We don't think that your answer, if you want to call it that, should be mostly fluff about the history, size, and even "geography" of plywood. If you're eHowian Victoria Ries, however, there's a pretty good chance that your HomeSteady.com post with that title will fall closer to the second description than the first.

Right up front, we'll point out that at least some of the dumbassery of the post is the fault of Leaf Group: when the company ported this content from eHow,com to HomeSteady, they duplicated the first paragraph and messed up the formatting. As far as we can tell, that's not on Ries.

On the other hand, quite a bit of internet stupidification is on Ries, including such claims as, "Plywood is better used for roofing than OSB (Oriented Strand Board) because OSB, once it gets wet, tends to turn to mush. Plywood may be reused by drying out the board and repairing the torn piece of roofing material or replacing missing shingles." We aren't quite sure, but it appears that Victoria thinks she's talking about the roofing itself instead of the roof deck. But, then, she's apparently not all that familiar with any uses: "Plywood is used widely throughout the construction industry, and is available in different thicknesses for various purposes such as walls, floors, sheds and roofing."

Besides the presence of the non-parallel "sheds," the idea of using plywood for walls is pretty much laughable. After spending 126 words babbling about the history of plywood, Ries spent another 64 on the "size" of plywood, reducing uses to,

"Th e [sic] 1/2-inch plywood would be used for making chests and cabinets, whil e [sic] 5/8-inch plywood would be used for constructing a roof. And , [sic] 3/4-inch plywood is good for flooring because of its strength and durability."

Yup: that's it. After briefly mentioning marine, interior, and exterior plywood; Ries went on to blow another 46 words on telling her readers where Georgia-Pacific has a plywood mill.
Nowhere does Victoria mention the dimensional stability of plywood, its usefulness as sheet goods, or its relatively low cost compared to that of the same volume of solid wood. Nowhere does Ries even mention that there are both softwood and hardwood plywoods or raise the possibility of different grades. Yup: once again, a clueless college student earns a Dumbass of the Day award by throwing words at the page; thereby contributing to the stupidification of the internet.

¹ The original has been deleted by Leaf Group, but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was   ehow.com/about_4676962_uses-of-plywood.html

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