Lockwood’s VG Pine weatherboard is a unique engineered cladding solution timber that is durable and has excellent sustainability credentials, whilst retaining the beauty of natural timber.
Development of Lockwood’s VG Pine weatherboard started over ten years ago with the question “what can we do to improve our sustainability story?”. We already had an excellent start: we build solid timber homes – and wood is regarded as the ultimate sustainable building material. Trees improve air quality by absorbing carbon dioxide. About 50% of the dry matter in wood is carbon – and when we use timber for building houses, that carbon stays locked up.
Further, in New Zealand, Pine is grown in plantation forests making us the world leader in supplying sustainably-grown timber. Using a locally-grown renewable resource like NZ-grown pine is an excellent choice when considering sustainability in construction. With a classic 200m² Lockwood home built on a timber floor, we are using this renewable resource to lock up around 25 tonnes of carbon. That is the equivalent of emissions driving a petrol car 125,000 kms!
Whilst Pine is an excellent material for almost all components of a home, but when used as a weatherboard cladding, it can have some characteristics that are not ideal. Over time traditional Pine weatherboards can show ‘cupping’ (where the edges of individual weatherboards cup out along the length of the board), and ‘splitting’. Cupping and splitting is largely due to how timber is cut at the mill. Almost all Pine in NZ is cut as ‘flat-sawn’ timber. But for exterior weatherboard cladding, ‘vertical grain’ timber is considered a much better option.
Vertical grain timber boards are much more stable than flat sawn timber. A Vertical grain board will change much less in its wide dimension with changes in humidity and weather, is less permeable (so will take up less water), and is therefore much more resistant to cupping and splitting.
We used our knowledge in wood technology and our experience in wood manufacturing to develop the Lockwood VG Pine weatherboard. We laminate a stack of flat sawn timber boards into a roughly squared beam, then vertically rip the laminate beam into individual boards which are then machined into a weatherboard profile, as shown in the graphic above.
The weatherboard is then laminated to the outside face of a Lockwood exterior board to create a unique cladding solution engineered to be stable and sustainable whilst retaining the beauty of natural timber. Clients can choose to use VG pine for the cladding of the whole home, or as a feature wall, pictured below.
