Bob Staebell checked in on this, back in 2009. As an owner of one of his products, I found it interesting. I paid Bob thousands of dollars for a beautiful cabinet that has high density composite board in it, knowing what I was getting. It's working perfectly, and I expect it outlive me by quite a while:
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I always enjoy when the topic of solid wood vs veneers in humidors comes up because it allows me to shed a little light on one of the more misunderstood areas of wood working. Which is better solid wood or a veneer?? The correct answer is both-- it depends on the specie of wood & application.
Not all woods are structurally sound enough to use as solid wood & there are applications where the expansion/contraction that occurs in any wood is undesirable.
There is no reputable humidor maker anywhere that would not use veneers in certain applications. To limit oneself to using only solid wood or only veneers, would mean that one could only build a very limited style of furniture & eliminate about 1/2 of the available woods for any given project.
Many of our most treasured antiques are made from a mix of veneers & solid woods.
Here are a couple of examples that came up in the first page of google for antique furniture. The crotch mahogany & walnut burl are used as veneers, because they are too unstable to use as a solid thick wood, as are many other highly figured woods.
http://www.rubylane.com/shop/piatik/item/PS04-12-06-01
< Broken link deleted - B.B.S. >
The craftsmen who built these great pieces with veneer didn't do so because they wanted to spend a year making a thin veneer with only the hand tools available 2-300 years ago--they did it because a thick solid wood burl would never survive more than a couple of years, much less the couple of centuries as these did by using veneers.
We simply continue the same tradition of fine woodworking by using the correct material--veneer or solid wood--using the same criteria they did 200 years ago. The physics of wood movement does not change. What has changed is we have better adhesives & a wider range of substrate materials to choose from.
This is why you will also see humidors by venerable makers Davidoff, Elie Bleu, Dunhill, Ashton, all using veneers, when high density tropical hardwoods & highly figured woods are involved. They like I, want our creations to last.
Re costMany of my veneers are layed up in a custom shop that specializes in working with nothing but veneers. They have millions of $ tied up in specialized veneer stitchers, 10 ft guillotines, & a veneer press that fills a large room. Quite often my costs for the finished veneer on a high end mdf or medex substrate are substantially higher than purchasing a solid slab of the same wood.
Cheers,
Bob Staebell
Aristocrat Humidors
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So, I guess the question is - was it advertised as a 'solid wood' humidor or what that your expectation? Does it hold the RH properly? Those are the things I'd worry most about....
JMHO - B.B.S.