LVL Beams for Dummies

LVL beam joints aren't glued, Cecelia...

We've heard it said that there is no such thing as a stupid question, a maxim that we find absurd. Of course there are stupid questions: what do you think stupid people ask, anyway? If you cut the original questioner (OQ) some slack, though, you'll often realize that the question isn't stupid, it's just badly worded. That usually happens because the OQ doesn't know the topic well enough to put together a "good" question. Unfortunately, many an eHow contributor ran with those badly worded questions even though they didn't know the topic any better than the OQ. A case in point: Cecelia Owens, whom we caught attempting to explain "How to Glue LVL Beams Together" for... wait for it... GardenGuides.com.

Yes, that's right: "Garden Guides." Oh, well, at least few people researching construction will stumble over the two-time DotD's particular brand of bullshit there!
We'll be honest: we weren't really sure whether the OQ wanted to build something by gluing together a couple of lengths of laminated veneer lumber (LVL) or was simply curious about how the stuff is made. We rather suspect the latter, since the whole point of LVL is load-bearing, and glued joints are unlikely to be as strong as those secured with fasteners.

Be that as it may, Cecelia pounded out a couple hundred words... almost entirely gibberish. By "gibberish," we mean that the J-school grad gushed bull such as,

"With wooden LVL beams, you must use extremely adhesive glue; not using strong enough glue will cause your wooden structures to collapse."

Owens had two citations, the first of which was Georgia-Pacific's spec sheet for their brand of LVL. The second was a bit more interesting: it seems that a custom carpenter described building a curved LVL beam by laminating strips of ³⁄₈-inch plywood. The original description¹ is fascinating, although Cecelia managed to reduce it not just to utter bullshit, but to conflate building LVL from scratch to gluing a couple of them together. What a load of horse manure!
Kudos to the carpenter who wrote up the post about building a curved LVL beam, and a steaming pile of Dumbass of the Day award to Owens for mangling his work. We are not amused.

¹ The fascinating post is gone, but you can still find it with the Wayback machine at archive.org. We bookmarked it for you...  http://bit.ly/2zgPdK3

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