Main > Woodworking
Materials other than MDF
Gilrock:
I used MDF for my Mame control panel. Luckily that taught me the lesson so I've used plywood for everything I've built since. With the MDF I had problems with the threaded nuts tearing up the MDF and then your hole is screwed up. And when you buy plywood go for the Baltic birch plywood to get a nice painting surface.
mahuti:
--- Quote ---Our Home Depot MDF that people use to build arcade machines here is crap.
--- End quote ---
I can second that specific bit. I have used MDF from Home Depot exactly ONE time. It's fuzzy, awful, the worst. It's so bad, when I used a router on it, I couldn't tell if I was following a curve because the edge just puffed up and feathered as I cut. If I tried to drill a hole through it, the backside just puffed out so bad in a mound, and basically fell apart when I tried to clean the edges up. It's so loosely packed that it takes paint poorly too. It was an awful material.
On the flipside, when I buy MDF at Lowes it has none of those problems. It still has the other shortcomings of MDF, but it's night and day compared to the stuff at Home Depot specifically.
I use MDF for a variety of things, but I don't consider it a structural material. I love it for it's ability to be shaped quickly and easily. For anything structural, I use plywood, often birch.
jennifer:
;)
Mike A:
Prototypes? Got any pics?
jennifer:
:)
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