23-06-14

Edge Banding – Everything You Need To Know

When you choose dorm furniture and decide on specifications, you will inevitably choose the materials you want.

Should it be all solid wood, including the top? Or should you use a solid wood or plywood base with a laminate top, or all laminate?

No matter what you choose, your furniture will likely include edging. Why?

Because it is an important part of the building. Depending on where we use it in our cabinets, it can increase the lifespan of your furniture.

In this short guide, part of our Essentials series for operations and facility leaders, you'll learn some of the basics of edgebanding.

What is edge banding?

So let's start from scratch. What is an edge band?

It's actually quite simple, and the video below will help you understand it better, but here's a quick overview to get you started.

This is a basic non-technical concept.

Plywood, particleboard and other artificial wood cores like MDF have rough, unfinished, unprotected and often unsightly edges.

With this in mind, some smart people have developed techniques that allow you to glue different strips of glossy finished material to those rough edges to match the top and sides.

Those narrow strips or strips are called edging tapes, and they range in thickness from 0.018 inches to 5mm thick and are rolled up to 250 feet.

Thicker edges are used in high traffic and commercial environments as it provides greater resilience and impact resistance. For example, the military requires thicker ⅜" solid wood edging for maximum impact resistance.

Edge banding machines are industrial grade machines that use hot melt adhesive or glue to apply edge banding tape to the raw edges of boards.

What’s the purpose of edge banding?

Edge strips serve functional and aesthetic purposes.

Functionally, edge bands perform some key duties for your furniture. First, they prevent the ingress of moisture, acting as a de facto seal on the edges of the core. Second, the edgeband improves durability and elasticity by providing impact resistance. If you use solid wood trim, it can also add to the overall strength of the furniture.

Aesthetically, edging strips hide unsightly rough edges and create a glossy finish that matches your top and sides. You can also create radial edges to soften sharp corners.

Where do we apply edge banding?

Where can you find edge strips for furniture? It depends on your overall material specification.

Solid wood products do not include any edging unless we cannot use solid wood. For example, wardrobe doors are made of veneer core plywood or MDF.

Even though we use solid wood for box sides and drawer fronts, many customers still use high pressure laminate tops. Those tops need edge sealing.

If you're using plywood or laminate as your material specification, that's also going to require edging.

DCI uses edgebanding in places you might not expect, such as plywood bed decks. Why? Because the fully sealed deck keeps bed bugs out. You can read more about mitigating bed bugs here.

Where can you find edge strips?

DCI does not use edging strips on the backs of cabinets or bottoms of drawers as they are already embedded (sealed) in the dato grooves. Likewise, we don't edging the interior plywood drawer parts as it doesn't add value.

You should be aware that some manufacturers don't use edging strips where they should be -- like the bottom and back edges of plywood cabinets. This is a problem because even a small amount of moisture can damage unsealed furniture.

What are edgebands made of?

What is edge banding tape made of? There are different materials, we'll just focus on a few here.