At the moment the production of wood flooring can be classified into two main types – real solid parquets and laminated parquets.
In solid parquets or those made of real wood, there are the following varieties: so-called solid parquets, multi-layer parquets, and the combination between them forms the third type, which is produced on the basis of HDF boards, the surface is a natural veneer, and the parquets are called fournettes.
All these types of floor coverings have their advantages and disadvantages.
The biggest advantages of laminate floors are that they are cheap and their moisture absorption is reduced by over 60%. This does not mean that they do not react to moisture, quite the contrary. They suggest a perfect, almost mirror-like surface, where, however, the joint comes out below 0.5 mm – for comparison, the usual joint in natural parquet is 1-1.5 mm, and thus it looks like arranged black threads on the parquet, which is not aesthetically beautiful.
The main advantage of massive parquets is that they are a natural material, which allows for additional processing – it allows renovation (cycling, rearranging, etc.), which increases its life expectancy within tens of years.
The variety of solid parquets – the three-layer parquets – aims to correct the reaction of the natural wood to moisture, which is obtained through the special structure of the board, which is a “sandwich” type. Or three layers of wood with different moisture absorption coefficients are selected. They are arranged perpendicular to each other and thus glued together, form a “sandwich” in which there is a characteristic interaction between the different layers in the direction of change and in the direction of bending.
The uppermost layer is the so-called noble layer, which bears the name of the tree. For example, if we talk about a three-layer beech parquet, it means that the top layer is made of beech and the other two layers are usually made of pine trees. Different types of conifers are chosen so that their different moisture absorption coefficients can be used.
When these three layers are glued together, the specific moisture absorption of the beech begins to counteract the specific moisture absorption of the other two layers of pine. In this way three-layer parquets react to moisture in the same way as laminates do – for this reason three-layer solid parquet can be demonstrated as a look and option in the same way as laminate, with the same physical changes, the difference being that they are made from natural materials that do not contain any impurities (formaldehyde).
It is characteristic of the production of laminate flooring that the soft wood fibers are extracted, mixed with resins and pressed. Depending on the density of this material, there are different types of product, for the names of which their own abbreviations are usually used, which are also determined by the degree of density of the material.
For example, MDF (middle drug) actually means medium pressure, and HDF (high pressure) means high pressure. That is why MDF boards, which are of medium pressure, are used in furniture making. Particular attention is paid to the fact that the denser a material is, the more pressure it can withstand and bear. Therefore, in the production of parquet, MDF is not used, but HDF is preferred.
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