Making 1 Inch Europly from 12mm Baltic Birch

Have you ever seen that cool thick plywood used in modern furniture and fixtures? It's often at least 1 inch baltic birch plywood (25mm).  

 Here's an example of thick plywood from a table at the Richard Serra exhibit in the Guggenheim Museum in Bilboa, Spain.

Some distributors sell 25mm and thicker Europly, but it's expensive, takes a long time to order, and requires a truck. You can make your own thick baltic birch plywood pretty easily.

Here's how to make 25mm baltic birch plywood:

Your basic strategy is going to be to glue up two 12mm sheets of baltic birch. 

MakerStock provides cut-to-size baltic birch plywood, so you don't need to haul full sheets from the distributor. (We also have pre-cut sizes up to about 30in x 60in.)

Simply glue two sheets together. We like TItebond glue, but pretty much any wood glue is fine. Use clamps and/or weights to ensure uniform pressure on the panel.

You'll probably want to trim to size to get a nice edge.

Two important points:

1. The resulting plywood will actually be 24mm thick. This is 1.4mm (about 1/16") shy of 1in thick. Of course you can use two sheets of 18mm to get 36mm plywood, or a sheet of 12mm and 18mm to get 30mm. You get the idea. 

2. Baltic birch plywood uses somewhat thinner veneers for the outer layers. So, your plywood will have a band in the middle comprised of two thinner layers (the former outer layers of the starting material). No one but the most finicky observer will notice.

1in Europly is a really nice thing to have around. For example, here's a crazy project our co-founder Karl did. He wanted to have a big TV in his loft, but didn't want it around most of the time. So, he used a pulley system and a counter weight (a 50 lb York barbell weight) to suspend the TV from the ceiling. He used 1 inch baltic birch plywood for the back panel to which he mounted the TV with four screws.