Any advice for salvaging oak tongue and groove flooring? Is there a good tool to cut the nails so the wood is not damaged?
Thanks,
Bill
Any advice for salvaging oak tongue and groove flooring? Is there a good tool to cut the nails so the wood is not damaged?
Thanks,
Bill
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Replies
I use wonder bars and pull gently up and away in the direction the nail went in after getting the edge under the wood near the nail. It feels almost a rotating action.
About a third of the pieces end up with some damage.
Well yea, there is a tool to do this sort of thing, but it's not going to be any fun to do..........ye olde sawzall with a fine tooth metal cutting blade. Pry the board up just far enough to flex the blade under and cut every nail. Better get the twelve pack of blades. Get some good knee pads before you start.
Bill,
I'm more in agreement with Piffin. I don't know, maybe the sawzall works fine, but it seems like extra work to me. Plus it leaves metal in the flooring.
Get a good assortment of pry bars and a couple at least 3-4' bars to work the flooring up. The key is to go slowly and feel what the wood is doing as you pry so you damage it as little as possible. The more experience you get the faster you go. Some damage is inevitable. Get a pair of dykes or endpullers to pull the nails through after you pry up the flooring -- a little harder to deal with staples but not the end of the world.
best, GO
The prybar method leaves metal in the wood too. Most older floors were installed with cut nails which are brittle metal. We set up with a set of benches and a guy or two on the benches is woreking nail removal all the time. Nail set to bak out broken ones. Set of fence pliers helps get hold of heads and pull.Excellence is its own reward!
So now the flooring is up and nails are removed. What comes next? Do you install as is and sand? Do you skim it thru a planer to remove the finish? Do you scrape out the grooves and tongue?Half of good living is staying out of bad situations.
Forget the primal scream, just Roar!
Just went thru that this year. Each board should have both tongue and groove side scraped clean(you would NOT believe the gunk that gets between floorboards). Next sort the wood into 3 piles. Boards w/only a slot, boards w/only a tongue and boards that have both slot and tongue. I'm sure there's a better technical term for this but I'm an ignorant civie. The boards that have both the tongue and slot will be used in the center. I also tried to sort the boards within each group by size. Very short pieces, medium pieces and long pieces.
Then the jigsaw puzzle work begins and it totally depends on the rooms. I'm lucky that my father is an engineer, so he was able to figure out where to start and how to go about things. Got less than 20% waste and used about half of the wood. Ended up selling the rest to my brother, who will put it in some rooms at his place. My redoak was rescued from a 2 story house (built in the 30s) for about 300USD. Hottest day of the year for rescuing and the hottest days of the summer for putting the stuff in. My floors will need to be sanded and refinished(when I've earned enough money to get it done) because the boards are at different heights.Meddle not in the affairs of dragons, for you are crunchy and taste good w/ketchup, cheese - especially applewood smoked gouda, a decent sized kosher/garlic pickle and let's not forget the 70% bittersweet Scharfenberger. Still working on the liquid refreshment.
All that I re-used, I re-milled first. Partly that was because it had been down for a long time and refinished a couple times, leaving it all inconsistant thicknesses. Double check very thoroughly tho if you are running it through machinery. The finish is hard enough on the planer blades without hitting metal. If you catch a piece of nail just wrong, it could kill you.Excellence is its own reward!
your probably going to waste some to get started, if you see a full width board along one wall, pull up the shoe, if you don't see a tongue, go to the opposite side and start, since you don't haVE room to lever up boards, come in a foot or so, and saw down the center of a line of boards, twice, an inch or so apart, waste these, now your home free, as described above,
You better believe piffin about the nail's, Bill, I once salvaged heart pine from an old house attic, and gave one of our flunkies a hammer, drift, etc , he was at it for two days, denailing the stuff, and missed alot, while sawing all the table saw, I felt a tap on my adams apple, wiped my throat with my hand and saw a streak of blood. A nail. Only minor but I think It could have been worse.
# # # # # # # , # # #--# # # # !
I had a piece of metal from a router bit clip my earlobe once, nail from the table saw clip my shoulder, and one from a circ saw hit my cheek.
Every one of those times (no more blood than from a healthy mosquito bite), reminded me of the story of a guy who was striking blows on a cold chisle with an ugly mushroom on the head of it. He suddenly dropped what he was doing and clutched his shoulder. Presently, he fell over and his compatriots were thinking he had a heart attack. He was dead before anybody figured out that he was bleeding. A piece of schrapnel had broken off the chisel and hit him in the carotid artery. The blood was running down inside his shirt as he lay on the ground so the wound wasn't immediately obvious and nobody had EMT training.
With all this history, I'm very nervous working used lumber.Excellence is its own reward!
you may want to invest in a small metal detector if you plan to do much salvage, the cost is cheaper than hurting yourself or the cost of new carbide tooling.
I'm interested, have you done that? Except I'm suspicious that every hole with rust residue will set the thing off.# # # # # # # , # # #--# # # # !
I have and still use them, I use the cheaper ones to find metal in things that have had rusted metal in them ( not as sensitive ) and more powerful ones for things that may or may not have metal ( like staples from tarping etc) I never send a board that may even have the slightest chance of having metal in it thru my plainer without checking.
wizard makes some inexpensive ones.