Wanting to draw some pictures on sheets of paper rather than in a sketchbook, I needed a work surface. At the Woodcraft shop in San Carlos, I found the perfect drawing board. A sheet of 13mm thick birch plywood, 24″ x 36″. 

Top grade spruce or birch plywood is a wonderful material. Once called “finnply” because most of the high quality veneer plywood was manufactured in Finland, this material is uniform, dense, and flat.  Most sheets of plywood you see in the home improvement stores have a thin veneer of nice looking wood on the faces, but the layers in between are made of thicker stuff.

This is generally fine for building kitchen cabinets, but if you want to build something that is strong for its weight, laminating several thin layers is the way to go. That is why you will commonly hear this material referred to as “aircraft plywood.” 

For a drawing board, this is a great material because it is flat, smooth, light, and has nice aesthetics. It smells good, looks good, feels nice in your hands once you have smoothed the edges a bit, and it even sounds nice when you handle it and bump it into things.

I made some very nice woodworking shop aids with similar plywood years ago. Router templates, jigs for holding parts when machining or clamping.  The density and uniformity make it perfect for curvilinear templates – guitar parts like headstocks and fingerboards for example.