FPInnovations has turned its gaze towards identifying opportunities for sawmills to generate higher revenues from solid wood. Although roughly 30% of lumber products go directly into single-family home building, wood has not benefited from the ~70% rise in building product prices since the pandemic. This price movement has made the value of wood in a building to be around 1% of the cost of a finished home. Our goal is to challenge the way we build with wood to drive the value from onsite labour into wood-based products. As an example, we worked with prefabricated suppliers to produce housing on CLT foundations (2024 – photo).
More recently, FPInnovations worked with UBC, in the Alex Fraser Research Forest, to demonstrate two, three season cabin accommodations for students, featuring new building systems, products and fasteners. Both cabins feature a new mechanically laminated timber (MLT) panel, constructed of three grades of boards, that act as in-fill walls between a post and beam structure. This enables lower-value, non-structural wood to play a key role in building. In addition, the siding on one of the buildings is thermally modified hemlock. Both buildings feature siding fastened to the structure by using LignoLoc ® Wooden Nails. FPInnovations is thankful to their partners on the project, including UBC, Gorman Bros and ScottyWood Canada.
This project has been made possible [in part] by Natural Resources Canada’s Forest Innovation Program
For more information, please contact
Tim Caldecott, Manager Business Development
Tim.Caldecott@fpinnovations.ca
