Masonite is a type of hardboard, a kind of engineered wood, which is made of steam-cooked and pressure-molded wood fibers in a process patented by William H. Mason. It is also called Quartrboard, Isorel, hernit, karlit, torex, treetex, and pressboard.

History

A product resembling masonite ( hardboard) was first made in

England England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe ...

in 1898 by hot-pressing waste paper.Akers, 1966, p. x Masonite was patented in 1924 in Laurel, Mississippi, by William H. Mason, who was a friend and protégé of

Thomas Edison Thomas Alva Edison (February 11, 1847October 18, 1931) was an American inventor and businessman. He developed many devices in fields such as electric power generation, mass communication, sound recording, and motion pictures. These inventi ...

. Mass production started in 1929. In the 1930s and 1940s, Masonite was used for applications including doors, roofing, walls, desktops, and canoes. It was sometimes used for house siding. Similar "tempered hardboard" is now a generic product made by many forest product companies. The Masonite Corporation entered the door business as a supplier of facings in 1972, and was purchased in 2001 by Premdor Corporation, a door maker, from its former parent International Paper. It no longer supplies generic hardboard.

Production

Masonite is formed using the Mason method, in which

wood Wood is a porous and fibrous structural tissue found in the stems and roots of trees and other woody plants. It is an organic materiala natural composite of cellulose fibers that are strong in tension and embedded in a matrix of lignin ...

chips are disintegrated by saturating them with steam, then increasing the steam or air pressure to and suddenly releasing them through an orifice to atmospheric pressure. Forming the fibers into boards on a screen, the boards are then pressed and heated to form the finished product with a smooth burnished finish. (Later a dry process with two burnished surfaces was also used.) The original

lignin Lignin is a class of complex organic polymers that form key structural materials in the support tissues of most plants. Lignins are particularly important in the formation of cell walls, especially in wood and bark, because they lend rigidity a ...

in the wood serves to bond the fibers without any added

adhesive Adhesive, also known as glue, cement, mucilage, or paste, is any non-metallic substance applied to one or both surfaces of two separate items that binds them together and resists their separation. The use of adhesives offers certain advant ...

. The long fibers give Masonite a high

bending In applied mechanics, bending (also known as flexure) characterizes the behavior of a slender structural element subjected to an external load applied perpendicularly to a longitudinal axis of the element. The structural element is assumed to ...

strength,

tensile strength Ultimate tensile strength (UTS), often shortened to tensile strength (TS), ultimate strength, or F_\text within equations, is the maximum stress that a material can withstand while being stretched or pulled before breaking. In brittle materials ...

, density, and stability. Unlike other composite wood panels, no

formaldehyde Formaldehyde ( , ) ( systematic name methanal) is a naturally occurring organic compound with the formula and structure . The pure compound is a pungent, colourless gas that polymerises spontaneously into paraformaldehyde (refer to section ...

-based resins are used to bind the fibers in Masonite.

Use

Artists have often used it as a support for painting, and in artistic media such as

linocut Linocut, also known as lino print, lino printing or linoleum art, is a printmaking technique, a variant of woodcut in which a sheet of linoleum (sometimes mounted on a wooden block) is used for a relief surface. A design is cut into the linoleu ...

printing. Masonite's smooth surface makes it a suitable material for

table tennis Table tennis, also known as ping-pong and whiff-whaff, is a sport in which two or four players hit a lightweight ball, also known as the ping-pong ball, back and forth across a table using small solid rackets. It takes place on a hard table div ...

tables and

skateboard A skateboard is a type of sports equipment used for skateboarding. They are usually made of a specially designed 7-8 ply maple plywood deck and polyurethane wheels attached to the underside by a pair of skateboarding trucks. The skateboarder ...

ramps. Masonite is used by

moving companies A moving company, removalist or van line is a company that helps people and businesses move their goods from one place to another. It offers all-inclusive services for relocations, like packing, loading, moving, unloading, unpacking, and a ...

. Among other things, they use it to protect the walls of buildings where they work, and lay on floors to enable smooth rolling of dollies loaded with goods. Masonite is widely used in construction, particularly in renovations where floors are finished prior to other work and require protection. Sheets of Masonite are typically laid over red rosin paper on finished floors to protect them. The Masonite sheets are taped together with

duct tape Duct tape (also called duck tape, from the cotton duck cloth it was originally made of) is cloth- or scrim-backed pressure-sensitive tape, often coated with polyethylene. There are a variety of constructions using different backings and adhesi ...

to prevent shifting and to keep substances from leaking through. Masonite is used extensively in the construction of sets for theater, film and television. It is especially common in theaters as the stage floor, painted matte black. It is considered one of the best materials for making a musical wobble board. Masonite panels are sometimes sawn into by 8-foot strips. These strips are used to form the edge of sidewalks where curved shapes are desired when pouring concrete. Masonite is a popular choice for cake boards for professional cake decorators, since it is a natural product and is strong enough to support multiple-tiered creations such as wedding cakes. To a lesser extent, Masonite is used in guitar bodies, most notably by Danelectro. Due to its low cost and flexibility, Masonite is widely used as the curved surface of skateboard ramps. Masonite was a popular protective backing for wooden console stereo and television cabinets from the 1960s to the 1980s. Due to its flexibility, Masonite is commonly used by model railroaders for their layouts as fascia, to cover the structural materials used for the layout.

Deterioration

Masonite swells and rots over time when exposed to the elements, and may prematurely deteriorate when it is used as exterior siding. In 1996, International Paper (IP) lost a class action suit brought by homeowners whose Masonite siding had deteriorated. The jury found that IP's Masonite siding was defective.

References

External links

Masonite Doors
{{Wood products Engineered wood Jones County, Mississippi 1924 introductions English inventions

History

Production

Use

Deterioration

See also

References

External links