That’s why you caulk the track and roadbed, then it doesn;t matter what the subroadbed material is.
I recently tossed out a 18"x7’ sectioon of a shelf layout I built more than 20 years ago. For most of that time, it has been stores standing on edge in an unheated uninsulated garage. Not even bowed. The end resting on the ground was dirty and discolored but not swelled. This stuff won;t warp, and the high density deadens sound. The downside is a sheet of the stuff is HEAVY. And the density and glue used to build it is hard on saw blades. It can chip out when sawing or drilling.
I have a 5’x8’x3/4 piece of that MDF ‘stuff’ sitting in my carport right now. It takes 2 big people to move it around, and I am deadly affraid of it getting wet in any manner. In fact even the high humidity we have here in FL at the moment is affecting it.
I just would NOT use this stuff in any instance. I’ve seen lots of furniture constructed of this crap, and its just not my cup of tea.
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On the downside, MDF tends to dull blades rather quickly, cannot be routed well (particularly since it is typically veneered at the factory) and requires pilot holes to avoid splitting. It also is very susceptible to water damage.
Then there is the formaldehyde. The fine sawdust produced by cutting MDF is quite unhealthy to breathe, so one should always wear a dust mask and work in a well-ventilated area when cutting MDF. Additionally, the veneers on MDF don’t prevent the urea formaldehyde from seeping through and evaporating into the air. Painting or fully sealing MDF will help stop the off-gassing urea formaldehyde, but in the case of mass-produced furniture, this step has been skipped. This likely means that every piece of cheap, mass-produced furniture i
The stuff I had, it’s definitely not MDF, nor is it anything like what I see sold as HDF either. This stuff was more off-white in color like ordinary wood, not the brownish color of the unpainted HDF I see in stores today.
All well and good to say don;t buy the wood at Lowes or HD, but there are no other palces around here that I can find. I’m willign to drive a little bit, but even my truck can’t take 4x8 sheets flat, so places that require much high speed highway travel are pretty much out. I know people do stuff like that allt he time, with the wood held in by oen tie strap, but I’m not those people.
There are actually 2 places not far from me that say they have the good Baltic Birch 12 or 13 ply stuff - however they are wholesale only. There is one independent retail lumber yard but they have little in terms of sheet goods for whatever reason. In the mean time, I’ve built two layouts using dimensional lumber, in one case from HD, that one lived in an unheated basement with humidity that varied from so dry that if you thought about moving you would build up a static charge to high in the summer that made it feel colder than it was. No warping. The other was all products from Lowes, that one lived in a spare bedroom so the variation wasn;t as great through the seasons. Also no warping.
I was really considering mostly plywood benchwork, cutting strips to form dimensional lumber, but I may be betteroff just sticking to standard stuff - except for the relatively small volume I needed for the previous layouts, I had to do a lot of cherry picking. Now needing at least 10x the lumber, it may tak foerver to get enough good pieces.
For a layout in an uneated outdoor shed in Florida humidity, I would suggest steel studs fro the framework and extruded foam for the base. Much like Chuck is doing to combat the excessive dryness in the desert climate he lives in.