Having done a lot of DIY projects over the last decade, I've really shifted my view of OSB. Originally I would lump it in with particleboard, but I've since drastically changed my view of it. Particleboard is, truly, junk. OSB and plywood are both pretty good products, and for some uses superior to hardwoods (dimensional stability, for example). High quality plywoods are amazing products. OSB for structure or underlayments are really quite good.
Particleboard is absolutely useless, MDF is mostly useless except using as a guaranteed flat surface on top of something to support it, hardboard is pretty useful in certain applications though. OSB is great and extremely affordable as sheathing, and there's a massive variety of plywood that's great for their respective purposes - from cheap rough sheathing, mid-grade for shop projects and filling large gaps in furniture, all the way up to beautiful and supremely strong Baltic birch.
Avoid particleboard like a plague if you can afford it, appparently most of IKEA products now made of these since they are widely being used in dirt cheap furniture construction. They melt like ice once in contact with water. Recently, just had to chopped off all four legs of a bookshelf then replaced them with metal legs. The bookshelf legs somehow got damaged in contact with accumulated air-cond water droplets.
Ikea has two or three price points for each product. The cheapest will be made from chipboard or even cardboard. The most expensive varies, it might be pine or even something better.
IKEA's cheapened their offerings quite a bit over the years. Pre-pandemic, used to be you could buy a solid wood butcher block and solid wood cabinet doors and fronts. Now? The butcher block is particleboard with end grain themed veneer and the closest to solid wood cabinet hardware you'll get is a set of bamboo drawer fronts.
I have their solid wood butcher block (made from prisms of solid wood glued together) and a countertop made from the same material. When oiled to given instructions, both are pretty indestructible under normal use.
It's very sad that they're not made anymore. I guessed it just was not imported here due to its prohibitive cost, but not being able to find it on the other side of the pond is saddening.
I bought their highest end leather couch with a fold out bed a couple years ago, due to time constraints. I was very unhappy to see it was made from chipboard. Of course their shelves and such you can see what you are buying, but I would not trust anything upholstered myself.
(Though the oak version, which costs more, is oak-veneered particleboard.)
Many Ikea things aren't designed to last. That table has cross-beams, so it has a better chance surviving a party where someone leans heavily against one end of it. Something like Mörbylånga [2] looks like it would collapse.
I would give the furniture on display a good shove to see how sturdy it is.
I actually have the Mörbylånga table at home and I find it very sturdy. One thing which the pictures doesn't show is that there are two supporting beams under the table, which provides the necessary strength to not collapse on first touch. Obviously, I have not done the actual test, but I will try to remember and report back if the table ever breaks.
Tangential, but if your table doesn't break in the next few days then you won't be able to report back, since editing and replying to comments get disabled after some days. I don't know what the exact time frame is like though.
> their shelves and such you can see what you are buying
no you can't, the outside shell of each shelf completely hides what's inside. I wanted to reconfigure a shelf (turn it on it's side, combine it with another) and turns out the "boards" are hollow. There is something inside at the corner pre-drilled-screw anchor points, but that's the only place you can attach something, the rest of it is potemkin shelf. You get to see this in more detail if you keep a shelf in a mildly humid place like a beachhouse, as the whoe thing delaminates and you see cardboard honeycombs inside a thin veneer of ...veneer
One of the things that complicates this conversation is that people who are huge fans of some specific Ikea furniture model bought it X years ago, and in the meanwhile its construction methods have switched to something cheaper. The "same" product can be both good and bad, depending on the year it was made.
I feel like the thing to do is to give whatever you are looking at in the showroom a pretty good shake, and to sit down on it hard. If it's creaky or loose at all there, it'll fall apart in no time at home
For now it is holding up and "feels" sturdy after a couple years, but I have no doubt it will fail at least 5 years before I would otherwise expect it to (I would want 10 years, but now expect 5). My fault for trusting Ikea + higher end = good without further verification.
Ikea used to have price points for each product. It was my goto for butcher block countertops but they have since transitioned to offering only crappy all veneer spongeboard.[0]
Just finished a walkin closet cabinet (from kits) installation. All walls, floor to ceiling, veneered particleboard. Heavy, fragile, crumbly, weirdly hard. Rather nope. Blame the client.
I ended up doing MDF tops for my workbench (1" MDF over 3/4 plywood), and finished them with shelac for a protected, low-friction surface. It is still vulnerable to water damage, but not as bad as unfinished, and as a spoil layer it's not bad. It has plusses and minuses.
Seconded! I recently built a large 50" x 90" work surface in my garage and used MDO sign board (another phenolic resin product, not much more expensive than MDF and available at many construction-oriented lumber yards) for the top surface over top of a hardwood plywood subsurface and heavily milled Douglas Fir legs and trusses, all doweled and glued together. I've been quite happy. It was easy to use a router on to make channels for t-tracks, and has been quite stable for the past 6 months or so through the fall, winter, and spring weather changes with only an oil-filled radiant heater to keep things from getting too frigid.
Unless there is a drop of moisture, then you throw it all away.
You might not want to set foot in your kitchen or bathroom then. Generally speaking cabinets (in the US) use particleboard frames. Higher end stuff will use plywood.
I went with IKEA's Sektion cabinets to replace some forty year old particleboard cabinets that warped after years of water damage from a burst pipe. They came with a twenty-five year warranty so there's clearly some expectation of longevity.
Those are normally coated in melamine, even the edges, hence the ability to use them in a wet area. Ironically standard worktops are only coated on the top, so those can take damage.
I could be wrong, but isn't MDF basically made from the waste of wood products? I mean, it's graded and standarised. But MDF _is_ the waste. So to waste it again is no great loss.
But as with all things, I'm certain some producers are using raw/virgin materials. Probably from wood that is dirt cheap.
MDF is an engineered product comprised of homogenized hard and soft wood pulp, binding agents. It is dehydrated and pressed together to create a material that is of higher density than fiber board.
The amount of sawdust needed to create a sheet of this stuff is astronomical compared to the output, not to mention the manufacturing process being very resource intensive. You also cannot just take bags of sawdust from the wood mill - it must be macerated and ground to a very fine dust with roughly the consistency of flour.
The main advantage it has is that it is heavy (to weigh down furniture) and very easy to cut with bandsaws, mills, lasers, etc because of its uniform distribution of its constituent parts. It’s also good for applying vinyl wraps and edging which is one reason why arcade cabinets are often made from it.
All this for a product that is roughly the same price as A cabinet-grade ply:
...which means MDF is fine if it's entirely clad in a few mm of something more water-resistant, with the MDF just serving as structural infill. (This is how most kitchen cabinetry is made. And they put up with the steam from a pot boiling below them just fine.)
Our kitchen countertops are MDF covered in some sort of laminate. The laminate is great, but the MDF is swelling over our dishwasher and looks hideous. I'd be careful near moisture even if it's covered.
MDF for structural anything? That seems surprising, it's really weak and prone to sagging, and quite heavy. It's about the last thing I'd want to hang on a wall.
MDF is also great if you need homogeneous materials (for stuff like speaker cabinets). And for those more than sturdy enough, they are also always protected by some layer.
Yes. I went on a deep dive recently looking for the sweet spot in affordable speakers and subwoofers for near field and home theatre use, and noted that almost every top performer under 1000USD per unit used entirely MDF cabinets. The exception was the Monolith THX series by Monoprice that pay up for HDF and still do well at their price point.
OSB is much more nuanced than particle board, often in a bad way. Many manufactures orient the chips along a single axis, meaning it shares the anisotropic properties of solid wood where the X axis has a different strength and expansion rate than the Y axis. And looking at the 3rd dimension, the Z axis is actually quite weak. If you glue something to the face of an OSB board, you can break the joint fairly easily because the individual chips pull out.
The issue with OSB, unless you get the ECO one, is the formaldehyde. It's basically pieces wood glued together. And generally bad for air quality. A few might be okay, but I've seen entire startup buildings covered in it.
The sheer amount of glue used in OSB and other manufactured sheet wood is pretty gross unfortunately. They are functionally useful for certain use cases, I just can't get myself to reach for it over real lumber and joinery.
Others touched on it too, but I don't like all the chemicals in the wood or all the energy required to make it.
If I'm building something I try really hard to avoid it, I can only assume the dust is really toxic to breath in and I don't have money or space for a fancy dust collection system.
Agreed. The range on plywood is pretty drastic and most of us only use the bad stuff. I wonder how many of us with homes made in the last 20-30 years realize that most of our joists are engineered joists made of plywood (basically wooden I-beams).
The alternative is usually a truss which tend to bounce like a trampoline over long spans. The engineered I-joists are really good, and the rim joist from the same company is ridiculously tough.
I recently put shelving up in my garage and could not convince myself to use anything other than OSB. It was just so damn cheap - half the price of any plywood for the same thickness. The only cons are the appearance and screw holding ability (but its sitting on brackets so the latter doesn't matter much).
Baltic birch would be stronger, no doubt, but that's 3 times the price and I am not exactly storing a geode collection up there.
Having done a lot of DIY projects over the last decade, I've really shifted my view of OSB. Originally I would lump it in with particleboard, but I've since drastically changed my view of it. Particleboard is, truly, junk. OSB and plywood are both pretty good products, and for some uses superior to hardwoods (dimensional stability, for example). High quality plywoods are amazing products. OSB for structure or underlayments are really quite good.