Hardwood Plywood for Dummies

Various plywood thicknesses

The business of "answering" random queries submitted to search engines is fraught indeed. Anyone who asks Alexa, Siri, Google Home, or Cortana is already familiar with the bogosity that infects search results. We see it every day... probably because our search results seem to think that eHow.com is an "authority." Be that as it may, one of the bigger problems with the model of harvesting searches and having freelancers address them (the eHow model) is that more than a few of those queries were submitted by people who had no idea what they were asking. It's even worse when the freelancer also had no idea... which happened when Nida Rasheed pretended to know the difference "Hard Plywood Vs. Soft Plywood" for eHow.com.

We submit that anyone actually familiar with plywood would have recognized that the question is actually "hardwood plywood vs. softwood plywood." Rasheed, unfortunately, didn't.

Nida's lack of plywood knowledge is apparent from her very first paragraph, the eHow-mandated introduction:

"Plywood is a decoration and furnishing material made from wood. It is made up of sheets of wood in varying or uniform thickness, bound together by glues of various strengths. Plywood comes in different varieties, namely hard and soft plywood. The quality of the wood determines whether plywood is hard or soft. Hard plywood is used in places where the plywood is put to demanding uses, while soft plywood works for most other industrial and construction uses."

First things first: the notion that plywood is "made up of sheets of wood in varying or uniform thickness" is, to be frank, ridiculous. Second, the difference between hardwood and plywood is a function of species; conifer (softwood) and deciduous (hardwood) trees. Not the "quality of wood." as Rasheed proudly intones.

Nida's total lack of qualification to address this topic continues to rear its head in such pronouncements as,

"For soft plywood the trees of choice are spruce, Douglas fir and maple, which are known for their flexibility and malleability. For hard plywood, the trees of choice are birch or tropical trees like red maple and mahogany..."

Well, which is it: maple is a softwood? or a hardwood? For the record, it's a hardwood. Or perhaps you're interested in learning that,

"Soft plywood comes in plies of three, five and seven. The ply means how many sheets are glued together to make a single board. The thickness of each ply ranges from 0.1 inch to 0.6 inch, depending on the required thickness of the finished panel..."

Ugh. Besides the weird claim that it comes in "plies of three, five and seven," Nida's claim that a ply thickness may be as much as 0.6 inches is utterly baseless (except for MDF-core). And perhaps you wanted to know that,

"Due to its longer life and hardiness, hard plywood is more expensive and is sold at a premium."

Ummm, the trees may be hardy, but the plywood?

Suffice it to say that there is barely a word of this rubbish that is correct or true. The whole damned company deserves a Dumbass of the Day award for letting Rasheed's bullshit-laden post stay online since 2012.

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