Baltic Birch Advantages And Experts Point of View

Baltic Birch is an excellent choice for your home improvement projects. Baltic Birch comes in metric thickness and in sizes about 5 feet by 5 feet. The plywood is excellent and has the quality which is required to do a good job for your home projects as well as to keep you from repairing mistakes.


 What about using  Baltic Birch for jigs and tooling aides: 

First things first, Baltic Birch is very stable and flat. Very important in making something like a cross cut sled or miter jig, etc. Second, the lamination are consistent, which have also been glued together well. What this does is allow one to edge detail Baltic Birch Plywood which you really can't do with most other ply products. This includes using box joints or dovetails on Baltic Birch drawer sides or, as in my case, cutting full bore lock miters along the edge. Also, MDF plywood cannot hold a screw or jigs if its life depended on it.

That is my politically correct way of saying this. When making jigs such as shaper jigs, you need to hold the blank into the jig. This is esp true when your freehand shaping parts on an industrial shaper with a massive 4 knife cutter head and guide bearing..


To Keep things in place, use the standard clamp which is the DeStaco clamp and these are held to the jig with wood screws. The effort of making the part is partly layout and partly finish work. By making a neat jig, you do the layout once and your parts are now faster to make and massively more consistent. Certain jigs are used over and over and over again. These often get a special hook on the wall. They are also made to be permanent with varnish finish, waxed table guides and destaco clamps.

Why would try to use MDF for such an item? Baltic birch is a multi layer birch plywood with many very thin, high quality laminations. Lately, the ex chech countries and the former USSR are getting into the market and they are selling a product called Russian Birch.

What makes it a bit different is that you can get it in 4 by 8 sheets. I recently bought several sheets of it and noticed that the birch was a bit stained. For substate use, this is fine. But if you using the birch as is and just finishing it with say varnish, this staining would not be very good. Overall, its good stuff but not as fine as the true baltic birch.

 There is a US version of baltic birch plywood as well which and it is called ApplePly. This is a trademarked name and has nothing to do with using actual apple wood. Its called ApplePly because its made in the United States and its as american as apply pie. This too is often available only in 4 by 8 sheets.

 Right now the stanard 5x5 baltic birch from is available from the supplier. The quality is high and the service great and it affects my price structure for everything. It would be nice to work with the 4x8 sheets as they are a bit nicer to work with in terms of maximizing the cut lists, but the other factors work this out in the end.

If the russian ply can improve its quality control a bit more, this would be a good substitute for baltic birch. So would ApplePly but its not carried by enough end dealers to make this a viable threat.