Light touch

On the first day of this year's Ecobuild, the sample bin on the Dendrolight stand rapidly emptied. The new lightweight engineered timber from Latvia has been grabbing attention at the world's premiere timber and construction exhibitions for the past year, finding a market in furniture, construction, door blanks, interior design and furniture.

James Latham has negotiated exclusive rights in the UK and is working with Dendrolight to develop sales and products. Lathams director Chris Sutton said it is an added-value, niche product that fits with the company's potential customer base very well.

"There are other products - honeycomb, for instance - but this has stability and is very light because so much timber has been taken out. We saw the interest it created at Ecobuild and we are quite excited about it," he said.

Dendrolight is a middle-layer material made from spruce, pine or aspen profiles, glued together in perpendicular angles and sandwiched between plywood, MDF, HDF or any other sheet material. The unique profiling reduces the weight by 40% and reduces the natural tensions in the wood, making it very stable.

Built up into blocks it can be used for floor-ceiling panels, internal and external wall elements or roof panels, which have high strength and, because of the voids, good thermal and sound insulation. Basic middle layer is designed for furniture, interior design, stairs and construction products, which can be curved and decked and edged with solid wood. It has high stiffness and low swelling characteristics, and weighs 260-477kg/m3 built up in three-, five- or seven-layer panels. Three-layer Dendrolight is used for quality furniture and interior design.

"It could be used for so many things - you can laminate it, veneer it, paint it, lip it, use standard timber fixings on it. We have to get it through the testing for load-bearing, but it could be used for lightweight staging, wall panels, shopfitting, chunky furniture or tables - tables for schools or occasional tables," said Mr Sutton.

Dendrolight is to be taken up by James Latham's speciality division to look into other applications such as the vehicle industry.

Mr Sutton believes that in the product's thickest form, the cost premium will not be much. "Added-value, niche products come at a premium price, but you have to look at total cost. There's less transport cost, less labour cost because you can move it around easier - it all has to be factored in."

Dendrolight is manufactured in a €26.5m, 75,000ft2 factory in Ventspils, in Latvia, due to be expanded later this year with another 86,000ft2 building. Production began in October 2010 and current capacity is 70,000m3. A second shift is to be added soon.

The material started life 10 years ago when Professor Johann Berger developed the concept for Austrian ski manufacturer Fischer. The internal comb structure reduced the skis' weight and gave a cushion effect. After using it in a kitchen board Prof Berger looked for new applications in construction and began exhibiting at wood exhibitions.

Peteris Vasuks, head of sales for Dendrolight, said: "My father saw it at an event in Germany. By then it had been developed and improved to third generation."

The company also makes windows and doors, and was investing in a high-capacity state-of-the-art plant in co-operation with Weinig. "Because of our experience and our experience working with Weinig we were recommended as one of the first five companies to manufacture Dendrolight," said Mr Vasuks.

Parallel efforts to develop a factory in Austria, Germany, Italy and Russia fell through. "We are the only ones that managed it and it's taken us a lot of time and effort. We're not part of a huge group that can support us with money and time and engineers. We worked with Weinig, but even they had to think about how to create a machine to do the job, and the tools and the blades to cut out the grooves," said Mr Vasuks.

The first phase is machined on specially developed PowerMat 2500s. Boards of 4200mm are planed to 18, 25 and 28mm thicknesses and, after profiling in a comb pattern, are split in two pieces on a 45° angle forming Dendrolight lamella. In this process 40% of the material is "extracted" and used for biofuel.

The patented part of the production process is the Dendrolight hot press in which the lamellas are cross-laminated in four layers, with each layer positioned 90O on the previous layer in a continuous process. In the cold press the four-layer cakes are multiplied six times to form 600mm-high pieces (4x25x6=600mm) to a fixed width of 1350mm and 1000-3000mm long.

These blocks are cut by bandsaw into Dendrolight middle layer material strips, which are sandwiched between sheet materials.

"The next step is to build up demand. We need to stabilise our product range. We are selling our goods in many countries - Germany, France, Scandinavia, Russia, Japan, the US, Thailand. For such a small company with such a new product they are testing for the products they want," said Mr Vasuks.

In the UK, James Latham is planning a promotion at Timber Expo in September, where the company is sponsoring the VIP lounge, in which creative examples of Dendrolight are expected to be on show.