Frequently Asked Questions
What does "stabilized" mean?
In stabilization, we penetrate, or infiltrate, wood blocks with our Novacure - stabilizing resin using a vacuum.
The blocks are then cured in an oven at 92 degrees C for several hours. The result is a hybrid material that absorbs hardly any water, is odourless and largely free of warping.
How do the colours get into the wood?
In addition to the natural colour, fungi can cause black lines or slight changes in colour, for example in bush-hammered beech or Amboina sapwood.
Furthermore, the Novacure stabilising resin can be dyed with colours and thus achieve monochrome or polychrome effects through multiple infiltration.
How can stabilised wood be processed?
The processing, i.e. sawing, drilling, sanding and gluing, can be done as usual.
Our stabilised wood is not sensitive to heat, grinds powdery and does not melt at higher temperatures like PMMA - stabilised wood.
Stabilized wood or better still tropical wood?
With our stabilized woods, we replace tropical woods as far as possible, which are irreplaceable in view of climate change and should be preserved.
Stability, density and processing are almost identical and in terms of susceptibility to cracking, stabilized wood even wins in comparison.
Another advantage is that stabilized wood can be processed immediately and does not have to be dried for a long time.
So why are there stabilized tropical woods?
We have a small number of stabilized tropical woods in our range.
Why? Because Amboina burl, for example, looks incomparable and because we mostly buy wood from fungus-infested trees that have ended their lives naturally.
This means that we only have a minor impact on the tropical ecosystem and do not support overexploitation.
Are the woods you offer legal?
In Europe, the import and sale of timber is regulated by the EUTR, whereas Cities regulates the global trade in protected timber.
We do not have Cities-listed woods in our range and we only buy a few woods from outside Europe.
In the case of timber that we import ourselves, we make sure that we comply with the regulations that apply to "traders" in the sense of the EUTR and, more generally, we naturally try to exclude illegally logged timber by rejecting dubious offers.
Further information on this topic can be found here (in German):