May 24th, 2010 in blogs Anyone out there using bamboo in their furniture? This renewable material is showing up everywhere from flooring to socks and furniture makers have jumped on the bandwagon too. Many turn to bamboo for its sleek appearance and "green" cache. The plant is a fast-growing grass that can take less than five years to mature. Hardwoods, on the other hand, can take decades. The material is also incredibly durable--harder than maple--though tough on tools. It comes as veneer or as laminated plyood (one brand is named Plyboo). Fine Woodworking readers have put it to use in tabletops, bookcases, cabinetry, boxes, and more.This bench by Phillip Sell won best-in-show at the Texas furniture maker's show two years ago. Never tried it before? Here are some tips on how to use it from a Q&A in our magazine. This is the only information I found in our archives on plywood, so if you have tips/lessons from the field to share... please post a comment below.

Question from Daryl Boudreaux of Wallingford, Penn.Attracted to bamboo as a renewable resource, I decided to make a small table using bamboo flooring. I installed new blades in my planer and removed the ridges on the back of the 4-in.-wide strips and the finish layer on the front. I knew that bamboo is loaded with silicates, but was shocked at the condition of the blades after planing about 1/8 in. off of about 50 linear feet. Best Canned Cat Food For Weight GainAfter cutting the legs on the tablesaw, I tried to handplane the slight mismatches on the glued-up leg joints. Dream Chair Patio Chaise LoungeI used very sharp blades at a high angle but still got extensive tearout. Cute Car Seat Belt CoverScrapers worked but became dull so fast that they were not a realistic option either.

Answer by David Ebner, a contemporary furniture maker from Brookhaven, NYI’ve worked with solid-core bamboo plywood and with sheets of bamboo veneer. I stack solid-core bamboo plywood to get thicker pieces or, for thinner ones, resaw it on the tablesaw and bring it to finished size using a wide belt sander. I do not recommend putting pieces through a thickness planer, as you will get tearout regardless of feed direction. For joinery, I’ve used dowels, biscuits, and slip tenons. When using through-tenons, I make them from bamboo. I use Titebond Original for laminating and assembling. I treat bamboo veneer like any other veneer, cutting and taping it to obtain the right size, and using Unibond 800 glue in a vacuum bag to apply the veneer. When trimming veneers, I use a standard carbide-tipped, flush-trimming router bit. I prefer to climb cut, which minimizes the splintering. In short, carbide works well on bamboo but steel planer blades don’t, and sanding is the best way to get surfaces with no tearout.

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Senior health advisor for Esri Xconomy’s EXOME Presents: Boston’s Life Science Disruptors Xconomy Presents: What’s Hot in Boston Healthtech Is Brown the New Green? Why Boston’s Ugly, Expensive Macallen Condos Shouldn’t Be a Model For Green Buildings Along West 4th Street in Boston, just past I-93 and the MBTA train yard, there’s a big brown apartment building with an odd sloping roof. I live about a mile away, and I’ve gone past this building several times on walks and bike rides without thinking much about it, except that it’s unattractive in an early-1970s sort of way. It reminded me of the work of the late Josep Lluís Sert, the architect responsible for such aging modernist eyesores as Harvard’s Science Center and Holyoke Center, the Peabody Terrace apartments in Cambridge, and the George Sherman Union complex at Boston University. I was surprised to learn this week that not only is the brown building brand new, but it’s being celebrated as an example of green design.

It’s called the Macallen Building, and it’s the subject of an independent documentary, “The Greening of Southie,” that’s currently making the film-festival rounds; I caught the movie this Tuesday at a screening hosted by Atlas Venture, a Boston-area venture capital firm. (Update 11/20/08: Here’s a video about the screening prepared by the filmmakers themselves.) A 140-unit luxury condominium complex, the Macallen Building has garnered warm reviews from architecture critics, including no less a figure than Pulitzer Prize-winning Boston Globe writer Robert Campbell. It’s also the first residential building in Boston to win a Gold-level LEED rating, something that can only be achieved through serious effort on the part of architects and developers. (LEED, for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, is a voluntary certification system devised by U.S. Green Building Council to encourage sustainable building practices.) So I’ll probably sound like an unenlightened, anti-environmentalist crank when I say this, but the Macallen Building strikes me as a sorry excuse for the “greening” of anything, let alone South Boston, the working-class neighborhood over which it looms.

If this project comes to be seen as a model for green development in Boston and other cities, the green-building movement is in big trouble. I do give the developers of the Macallen Building, Pappas Enterprises, credit for deciding to pursue LEED certification in the first place. As the film makes clear, the decision led to a thousand headaches that the company could have avoided by doing things the old-fashioned way. Construction crews had to set aside scrap metal for recycling, for example, rather than tossing all of the project’s construction waste into landfill-bound dumpsters. They cheerfully tried unproven but “sustainable” materials—such as the non-toxic glue holding down the condo units’ bamboo floors—that wound up causing costly complications. And you can’t argue with green design’s benefits: features like double-flush toilets, rainwater-trapping systems for landscape irrigation, and extensive natural lighting through double-paned, floor-to-ceiling windows mean that the building will save 600,000 gallons of water per year and use 30 percent less electricity than a non-green building.

I also have no objection to the way Pappas has made the building’s green design into a selling point with environmentally conscious condo buyers. Because the building is LEED-certified, the company is able to charge about 10 percent more than developers are getting for similarly sized condos in this corner of the city, according to the real estate review site ApartmentTherapy. That’s fine with me. After going to so much trouble, the company deserves to earn a bit of profit—and who’s going to finance the green-technology overhaul this country needs, if not capitalists? “Green is not about sacrifice…it is about understanding that doing good and doing well often go hand in hand,” the Macallen Building’s website intones. I couldn’t have put it better myself. But there are several aspects of the Macallen project that bother me. One is the unfortunate symbolism in the fact that Boston’s first green residential building is a luxury condo. You have to be doing pretty well, indeed, to afford a one-bedroom, one-bath unit for $600,000 or a three-bedroom for $2.1 million.