I spent some time browsing your links. It seemed pretty odd that the only point of contact is this Weidman-Creative.com, with a webpage that is still under construction after two years.
There are a few articles about projects by designers that used the material, but they are dated. Still, it might be worth trying to contact them… then again, this may be a failed product.
All the searches I ran come back to MAPLEXMATERIALS.com. A little digging revealed:
MAPLEX AHHH yes. My school was given a crap load of that for Intro classes to base projects around about 3 years back.
What I heard:
It’s pretty much compressed bark. It was marketed to us an a “green” material because it doesn’t use any adhesive as a binder. It was first used to insulate electrical boxes because it is flexible and rugged enough to survive moisture. I think it was proprietary to GE.
What I know:
-It’s like handling a sheet of Cresent board if it were an 1/16th of an inch thick, but the edges feel and smells like Masonite. It bends like Cresent board in that you can achieve a very nice curve up until a point and then it cracks and bends. It can tear like a very thin piece of Masonite.
-You can soak it in water, place it in a jig and it will retain that shape relatively well, but it is not a material for structure. Wet Maplex smells like wet dog.
-The kicker is that it got banned from our shop because peoples faces would begin to swell if they inhale fumes from it burning, like if somebody took it through a bandsaw too slowly.
It laser cuts beautifully so I used it as a veneer on top of Masonite. I made a couch cubby for a ridiculous couch that I found in an alley to occupy the space of a missing cushion. Good old intro project. You can get an idea of its texture from the second picture of the mock-up.
@Lmo - thank you very much, indeed I have sent emails to the designer that used this material, hope I’ll get a reply, also a big thank you for calling thier office @GEBS - thank you so much for the hands on information about what the material is like and the photos, I thought it was a good alternative to plywood from the way it was advertised in http://www.erikahanson.com/projects/consulting/4/maplex_brochure.pdf
