As a British Glulam Manufacturer – why do Buckland buy from Germany?

It often comes as a surprise to our customers that we import glulam from Germany given that we manufacture it ourselves. Here we explain why we import so often and how it is helpful to both our customers and our industry.

We manufacture glulam from a huge variety of timber species in house – everything from Larch to Redwood, Douglas fir to most recently Accoya. We’re particularly good at making curved glulam beams, or beams to span incredibly wide frames for large projects. So, our factory is designed for ‘flexible’ rather than ‘mass’ production.

As our factory is usually running at full capacity on the more bespoke work, we also work with partners in Germany to take advantage of the mass production facilities available there. This allows us to extend our capacity to deliver projects and keep prices as competitive as possible.

We bring in full loads of glulam from German at least monthly and offer our customers a made to order service for spruce glulam beams on these loads.  Here are just a few of the benefits of this service.

Reduced cost

The first, and probably most obvious reason to import spruce in larger quantities is to take advantage of the lower cost.

By consolidating orders together in one load we can reduce the cost of travel and have more negotiating power over final price due to the value of the total order. We place large orders anyway, but figure others may as well benefit from this too!

No import paperwork

While importing goods is not technically difficult, it still requires your company to be:

• up to speed on import requirements
• able to use its resources to process paperwork accurately.

If you order regularly as we do, this is a cost that is already factored into the business, but if your requirements are smaller, this can be an element which might put you off importing glulam. By ordering through us we can shoulder the responsibility for you.

Access higher strength grades

One of the reasons we import a lot of our Spruce is so we can include higher strength grades for those projects that need them. In house we can manufacture glulam beams up to GL24, but if a project requires above GL24 – up to GL32, we need an alternative source. While for most of the projects we work on a strength grade of GL24 or below is suitable, depending on the engineering requirements of the project, it is sometimes crucial to have a higher strength grade.