Whereas most people are naturally drawn to timber as an attractive material, homeowners are fearful of the added maintenance that external timber requires. Shiplap boarding - usually painted white - was widely used as a decorative infill panel in new housing in the 1960s and 1970s and there are countless thousands of such homes around today where this boarding has been allowed to deteriorate badly, the paint having flaked off to expose the underlying wood which has turned an unwelcoming grey-black colour. A powerful advert for PVC windows.
Now Eternit has entered the market with a new product called Weatherboard 50. Like most Eternit products, it’s made of fibre cement and the 50 in the title refers to the fact that it is guaranteed for 50 years. It’s an American product which apes the look and feel of cedar sidings - it not only looks convincingly like painted timber but has a similar rough grainy texture.
It is supplied in 190 mm wide boards which are nailed onto battens, exactly in the same manner as you would fix shiplap or featheredge boarding. It can also be factory stained or painted - although as it’s a surface treatment, not a through colour, this will only be guaranteed for 10 years. In price terms, it’s midway between the basic softwoods and cedar: if bought in sufficient quantity, the price is around £12/m2 ready painted (just under £2/m). The other useful attribute it has is that it is Class 0 fire rated and is thus particularly suitable where a timber clad exterior is called for near a boundary.
Jonathan Coffins, director of Cambridge-based Churchfield Homes, has used Weatherboard 50 on a facsimile barn they have just completed. “We used it on one elevation of the house which was just 1 m from the boundary and therefore needed to be fireproof. We had to experiment a bit to get the colour right to match the black stained timber on the rest of the house: in the end we used a masonry paint, Johnstone Stormshield, but the effect is fine.”
Churchfield found that it was just as easy to work with as timber and it could take annular ring shank nails right up to edge without splitting. “The sales literature shows Weatherboard 50 being cut with a handsaw or a jigsaw but we found that it blunted everything we threw at it remarkably quickly. However, we then discovered that you could simply score it with a Stanley knife and then break it in two, so it ended up being no more difficult to cut than plasterboard.” Eternit Weatherboard 50 costs around £250 factory painted for 30 lengths of 3.65 m long if buying in bulk quantities - or £14/m2.
Source
Building Homes
