What Is Lamination?
Lamination is the process in which two materials are pressed together and secured using heat or pressure. Lamination is most commonly recognized on driver’s licenses, where the licenses are produced on small printers and then machines are used to heat and shrink plastic over the paper in order to create a barrier to protect the licenses from becoming damaged. Lamination is also used in this way to protect sensitive documents.
Another use for lamination is in packaging products for transfer to retail stores and sold. You will find lamination on packaged foods and merchandise such as toys and some packaged clothing. These are just a few of the many ways that lamination is used for retail goods.
Lamination is also used to make wood products such as plywood, flooring, and wooden beams. Lamination is used to press pieces of wood together in order to make them larger and stronger than they would be if used as a single piece of wood. Lamination is a common use to strengthen wood to make furniture. Many people feel that when lamination is used for furniture wood it is cheap and will not last. This is not true. Often the lamination process makes the furniture much stronger, yet less expensive because it is cheaper to laminate several pieces of wood together to create large pieces of wood than to find single pieces that are large enough.
Laminate flooring is an interesting process. A laminate floor looks like hardwood flooring but it is really just a photograph of wood pressed onto some particle board with a hard, protective covering on top. Laminate flooring is typically sold in squares or strips and are either snapped together or fitted and glued together when placed on the floor. Laminate flooring, while less expensive than hard wood flooring, is more resistant to elements such as moisture, pets, hard shoes and chairs scraping on them. A laminate floor will last a long time and still look great.
For those people who don’t appreciate laminated furniture and flooring because they think it’s cheap, I say take a closer look. Chances are that some of the furniture and flooring in your house is a product of lamination.
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