Expanding The Freres Engineered Wood Products Line

We’ve made some exciting updates to our product offerings at Freres Engineered Wood. Due to increasing customer demand, we now provide 9’ and 10’ long plywood panels, 1.5” thick laminated veneer lumber (LVL) products, and new material stiffness grades of 2.1E and 1.9E for our LVL products. Additionally, we’ve introduced new appearance grade options for our Mass Ply products.

Producing 9’ and 10’ veneers has been a staple for us, so expanding our plywood offerings to these lengths was a natural progression. This expansion is important for us to diversify our product offerings and allow us to take advantage of portions of the market that we haven’t accessed before. We’ve started test runs of these new panels and plan to launch them in August 2024.

In our LVL product mix, we’re now producing up to 1.5” thick plywood and LVL products in single laminations and 2” thick or greater LVL products with secondary lamination. Our first project using the new 1.5” product is the Onan House with TimberBLDR in Dripping Springs, Texas, utilizing a Mass Ply light framing technique.

We’re also offering 2.1E and 1.9E material stiffness grades for various beam or header needs, including sizes like 3.5”, 5.25”, or 7”. These new offerings enable us to create thicker, fully laminated beams and headers using our innovative Mass Ply manufacturing process.

We recently showcased our expanded product mix at the 2024 International Mass Timber Conference (MTC) in March. It was fantastic to debut a sample of our new appearance grade for Mass Ply products, designed to mimic the look of cross-laminated timber (CLT) rather than traditional plywood, along with new options for an “edge grain” appearance.

We’re excited to continue innovating and expanding our product offerings to meet the needs of the market. If you want to know if our products would be the perfect fit for your project, give us a call at 503-859-2121 or visit www.frereswood.com.