Interesting project! Looking forward to part two. Not familiar with the wood though. I thought that you had to glue pieces of wood unto each other to make sure it will take the strain? From what I can see from the pictures it is just a single piece of wood…
Laminated wood is necessary if the essence used has the tendency to bend with humidity and you plan to treat it with oil.
With properly seasoned wood or stable essences it is a redundant operation.
In this case the wood is used only as structural core: the carbon skin is what will hold the stress.
The paulownia wood is extremely stable (that piece of wood has been outside in the rain for one year and in the garden hut for another year… slightly moldy but totally straight. It is extremely light (280 kg/m3 ) and with a compressive strength of 20.7 MPa (around 200 kg per cm2 ): perfect as structural core for composite structures, it’s adesion with skin layer is excellent.
