[SML] Masonite Stage Floor Issue

[Matthew J. Evans]

Just came across this in my research and thought I would share...


> March, 2004
> Originally published in the Newsletter of the Society for Tempera
> Painters, Spring 2004
>


> Masonite is Discontinued
> On March 1st, Masonite International announced it would permanently
> discontinue
> production of its popular range of hardboard products. The closure of its
> Danville,
> Virginia plant, employing 172 people, would be effective March 25th, 2004.
> The Danville
> plant had been making hardboard under the trade name Duron for 38 years
> and was
> Masonite’s last remaining hardboard facility. No plans were being made to
> manufacture
> the product off-shore.
> The company had been burdened with class-action lawsuits relating to the
> performance
> of a house-siding product it had marketed. But it also found it difficult
> to compete with
> foreign manufacturers bringing lower-quality, cheaper boards into the
> market. And too,
> the uses for hardboard have dwindled in the construction industry as other
> higher
> performance engineered-wood products have come along. Nick Pavlovitch,
> national
> sales manager, said that the largest remaining market for its Duron
> product was interior
> store fixtures and furniture. The company was purchased recently by the
> world’s largest
> prefab door maker and will continue to market doors under the Masonite
> name.
> This brings to a close a long-running American manufacturing success
> story. William H.
> Mason founded the Mason Fiber Company, later the Masonite Corporation, in
> 1926
> around his patented process for making what he called Presdwood. Although
> there are
> precursor products appearing in the late 1800’s, Mason’s process was the
> first to yield
> what we all know as, well, masonite. The beauty of the product was in its
> simplicity.
> Waste sawdust was slurried with water and placed under high heat and
> pressure. The
> lignins already present in the wood acted as glue while the fibers were
> randomly
> reordered and the result was re-engineered wood. It was dense, dry,
> uniform,
> predictable and dimensionally stable.
> Artists were among the first to recognize its usefulness and in fact Ralph
> Mayer used it
> and analyzed its properties since its introduction. Perhaps no type of
> artist found it more
> useful than egg-tempera artists. The tempera artist must work on gesso and
> gesso
> must be prepared on wood. But wood panels suffer many defects due to grain
> and
> other discontinuities, plus they are heavy and bulky and difficult to
> prepare. Masonite is
> wood without all the problems and is therefore a brilliant solution for
> the tempera artist.
> Where does this news leave the egg-tempera artist? I was particularly
> concerned since
> I had recently developed a gessoed panel product for egg tempera painters,
> now being
> manufactured by the company True Gesso. Readers of this Newsletter may
> have seen
> the survey I made of the hardboards currently available to artists,
> published last Fall [1],
> 2003. In my analysis I identified only two products that fully made the
> grade, one of
> them being Masonite’s Untempered Duron. I was worried that both US-made
> products
> might succumb to the same pressures.
> I called the Louisiana-Pacific factory, the maker of the only other board
> which in my
> analysis is artist-grade. They assured me that they had no plans to
> discontinue their
> hardboard products. Indeed, they are now the “last man standing,” to quote
> L-P’s Tom
> Gruder, one of the plant managers. Now the oldest remaining US
> manufacturer of
> hardboard, they are already operating close to capacity to fill the void
> left by Masonite
> for the highest-grade types of hardboard. He warns that the price may
> fluctuate if
> supply gets tight, but otherwise sees business as usual.
> The particular board of interest to artists is Louisiana-Pacific’s
> Standard Hardboard, not
> to be confused with their Tempered boards. Depending on the manufacturer, a
> tempered board may be more reliable to work on than it was in the past but
> it is still a
> hardboard which has been coated liberally with linseed and/or tung oil.
> The cellulose
> fibers of hardboard can then be expected to suffer the same degradation as
> cellulosic
> linen, cotton or paper fibers coming in contact with an acidic drying oil.
> The tempering
> process may well yield a better construction product and a slicker surface
> for industrial
> painting purposes, but can only degrade the board from an artist’s point
> of view.
> So it was the Standard Hardboard product which concerned me since this is
> the board I
> specified for the egg tempera panels I developed. For reasons I go into in
> detail in the
> aforementioned article, it is important that artists avoid using the
> unbranded or foreign
> boards available in most hardware stores and lumberyards. Around the
> country it is
> typically a special-order item; it is not available in standard
> lumberyards and seems to
> have limited industrial uses. But Mr. Gruder assured me that this
> high-quality product
> would remain available.
> Eric Thomson
> [1] Which Hardboard is Best? , Society of Tempera Painters, 19th Edition
> Newsletter.
> copyright © 2003-8 Eric Thomson, Argos Gallery, Santa Fe, NM
> all rights reserved; contact the author for permission to reprint in part
> or in whole.
>
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