Laminated Bamboo Products

Making use of the best base material will result in the best final product. Bamboo stems have an optimum age when talking about Bamboo’Ali products: ideally, the stems are harvested when they are 5 years old. Younger stems are not fully lignified and, therefore, the material will not have the right density and is not hard enough. Older stems turn grey, resulting in unattractive stains in final products. The quality of the bamboo stems can be partly determined during purchasing, but this is difficult to see in the new final product as the bamboo can still behave in an unexpected way later on when low quality stems have been used. Bamboo’Ali products are made of the best base material, which is checked carefully by our own skillful workers, before production is started.

Freshly harvested bamboo stems are cut into strips, and this production process consists of more than just slicing the hollow bamboo stem into pieces. When removing the skin, bamboo material is also lost, which is considered waste that can be used as biomass for energy production. The more bamboo that is removed and turned into biomass, the more expensive the remaining strip becomes meaning the best bamboo strips have no skin left, thus are the most best quality strips. When determining the quality of the strips, it is the purchasing phase that is of importance, but you will not directly see the difference in the final product. Bamboo’Ali only accepts high quality strips for its bamboo products and our experienced workers check the strips before production is started.

Our laminated bamboo products come in two standard colours: Natural and Carbonize. Natural is the colour of the material without thermal treatment. When the bamboo strips are steamed, they become darker and more brownish: Carbonize. Natural and Carbonize strips are suitable for indoor use and, only after impregnation, Carbonize strips are also suitable for both indoor and outdoor uses. The bamboo strips will be dried until they reach the necessary moisture percentage for further production.

Bamboo is, like any other natural material, affected by moisture: it expands when its moisture content increases and contracts when its moisture content decreases. It is crucial that the moisture content is lowered and controlled in drying rooms within each production step. The moisture content of the final product determines significantly the way bamboo products behave after installation. A large difference in moisture content can create big problems. As an example: when installing a product with a too high moisture content in a dry area, the bamboo product will shrink because the moisture content decreases in the new situation. To ensure the high quality of the final bamboo products, Bamboo’Ali quality inspectors keep track of the moisture content during and after production of each production batch.

Since bamboo is a natural product and only a steam process is used to change the colour of the strips, it is possible that there are slight differences in colour between the individual strips. Before the strips are ready to be processed further, they will be sorted by colour tone and checked for their quality. While many producers make bamboo products of the mixed coloured strips they have in stock, Bamboo’Ali can define the required colour or supply bamboo products in specific colour batches.

The bamboo strips will be glued together. Although the final product only contains 1 to 2% of glue, Bamboo’Ali aims to replace chemical resins by bio-glues. So far, no bio-glue can match the high Bamboo’Ali quality requirements. Until bio-glues can be used in production, without compromising quality, glue from respectable brands is used, ensuring the lowest emissions and best bonding. The type and amount of glue is very hard to determine once the final product is manufactured. Glue costs are significantly decisive on the total production costs. Many factories make their own glue or use glue from a local supplier to lower such costs, while we choose to work with respectable brands.

7. Laminating bamboo can be done in various ways