Queued Up for QC

 When touring the plant you can see beams stacked up waiting for fabrication. A special few will have blue tags on the ends. These tags are an in-house system so our Finishing Department knows to save these end cut offs for AITC quality control testing.

The ends of these beams will go to our Quality Control Manager to test and verify the strength and durability of our Face Joints (the glue lines you can see on the side of the glulam members). The first bondline shear test, where small samples are broken right at the glue line. We check the pressure at which failure occurred and look at the broken surface to see what percentage shows wood vs adhesive failure. We are looking for a high pressure and a high percentage of wood failure.

The next test is done in our cyclic delamination chamber. This is intended to test the durability of our face joint bond. Small samples are placed inside, then the tank is closed and filled with water. We pull a vacuum , then pressurize the tank to saturate the test samples. 

Later, the tank is drained and the samples placed in a drier to quickly remove the moisture. This rapid saturation and drying is very hard on wood, making it expand and contract, causing lots of small breaks between the wood fibers. It approximates 10 years worth of exterior weathering in just a day or two. Afterwards, the samples are inspected to determine if this weathering caused any loss of bond at the glue lines.

This is all part of maintaining our American Institute of Timber Construction (AITC) certification for manufacturing.