Rescued woodflooring: landfill or use?
We rescued some 3/4 thick, 2 1/4 wide, maple, tongue and groove flooring from an old farmhouse. What do we do now? 1. There is a hard, dried residue on the sides of the tongue and groove. How can this be removed without damaging or altering the wood? 2. Do we put it together and sand it or should it be planed first? 3. The wood is cracked by the original nails. We’ll be re-nailing betwwen those areas but are the cracks going to affect the function of the board? 4. It appears dry and brittle. Is there a way to test for moisture content? Can it be too dry? 5. What are the best procedures to follow to prepare and reuse this wood? Thanks for any and all help.
Replies
1. Take two 3/4" chisels and have custom scrapers made to fit the T and G profiles. Each will have three working edges. The bevel should be around 30* and the scraping edges should be about 1/32 thick at 90* to the bevel. Scrape with the bevel to the wood
2. Yes. Both. The mill where you have them planed may clean the T&G or they may insist they be cleaned first. Sand after install.
3.
SamT
Edited 8/13/2007 11:56 am by SamT
Sorry, hit the wrong button.
3. No, but fill the cracks with epoxy after install, but before sanding.
4. yes. I don't know.
5. I would be thinking of painting a 5:1 mix of slow drying thinner:linseed oil or other oil based finish on them and letting the air dry for a month, making sure that no two pieces touched and stickering between every layer before doing anything else. Brush it on each surface until it stayed wet for at least 30 seconds. That would replace some of the original natural oils lost and soften the crud in the T&Gs making it easier to clean.
If Sphere posts with different methods, I defer to him.
SamT
You nailed it pretty well.
Except the planer part ( IMO) a wide belt sander is mo betta.
Yeah, haul it to a shop, else yer likely to kill a planer, and grain tearout the heck outta the wood, IF the feed rollers can hold it going into the knives.
Thanks for all the information. We'll give it a go.
We don't get to a computer often, may be contacting you again as we get going.
thanks again,
phil and kathleen
3. the cracks are not in the face of the board, they are in the tongue (the place where the nail went in and split the tongue...an inch and a half in each direction). do we still epoxy?
again, thanks,
phil and kathleen
3. Split tongues. No epoxy. I thought, don't know why, they were in the face. Brain fart.A shaper is like an uber router. Table mounted, much more control than handheld, auto feeds stock.Reshaping the T&Gs does narrow the board a bit, but makes it much more like new. If you don't go this route, you may have to sand the tongues where they split to reduce the expanded wood back to fit the groove.You need to take the worst pieces to your mill and ask how much material they'll have to take off. You should inspect each stick as it might save width to cut ends off or sections out where it's really bad. Then again, an inch or so of missing tongue isn't that bad. Losing the top of a groove is not acceptable. Losing a short length of the bottom is ok as long as you're not aligning that spot with a missing tongue.Losing 1/2 the width of the tongue is no problem, more than that requires an experienced expert LOCAL flooring installer to decide. Somebody who has lived there and done that for the last 135 years.SamT
Run it through a shaper and gut new grooves on all four edges, then use slip tongues.
Sand after install.
"Put your creed in your deed." Emerson
"When asked if you can do something, tell'em "Why certainly I can", then get busy and find a way to do it." T. Roosevelt
"Run it through a shaper and gut new grooves on all four edges, then use slip tongues"
Hey Ed, what's the reasoning behind this?
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Faster than trying to get knives set up to just clean off the crud from the tongue. Plus if the tongue is split like he says, then the slip tongue will remedy that problem. And then the boards can be laid either direction without regard to the original tongue."Put your creed in your deed." Emerson
"When asked if you can do something, tell'em "Why certainly I can", then get busy and find a way to do it." T. Roosevelt
not sure what a shaper is. is it different than using a router bit? does it make the board slightly narrower? we'll start contacting wood mills in the area.
thanks for your help,
phil and kathleen
You could remill the grooves with a router mounted in a table, but it would be a chore. A shaper is a really heavy duty router that cannot be removed from the table. Sort of. Depending on how the fence is set up, you will lose maybe 1/4" off the width, but you will end up with nice clean grooves.
A slip tongue is a piece of wood about 1/4" thick x 1/2" wide x a couple of feet long. It's the tongue part of the t&g board, without the board. It is used when you have two boards joined groove-to-groove. If you have the old boards re-grooved both edges, you will loose very little width, but won't have a tongue. That's where the slip tongue is used. Or you could have your boards remilled with t&g, but you would lose close to 1/2" of width."Put your creed in your deed." Emerson
"When asked if you can do something, tell'em "Why certainly I can", then get busy and find a way to do it." T. Roosevelt
"but you would lose close to 1/2" of width."That would depend on remilling complete new T&Gs. If all they needed was a good cleanup, one might only lose 1/8" overall width.SamT
He's saying that the tongues are split pretty badly, so I was allowing for ripping that edge square, then passing it through the shaper. You might be right."Put your creed in your deed." Emerson
"When asked if you can do something, tell'em "Why certainly I can", then get busy and find a way to do it." T. Roosevelt
"He's saying that the tongues are split pretty badly"That/ld be different. I had the vague impression that they were only split a little bit about every two feet.SamT
A shaper is sort of like a big router table with a huge motor, which has a shaft instead of a collet. The bits are large, three-wing cutters, with a hole in the center. You slide one onto the motor shaft and lock it down with a big nut, sort of like mounting a thick blade on a table saw.They have the advantage of power and stability and the disadvantage of expense.George Patterson
Also, not familiar with the slip tongue procedure/system. Can you explain to someone who has only laid perfectly milled floors? Again, we'll also be checking with mills in the area. NOTE: we don't get to a computer often.
thanks again,
kathleen and phil
With a slip tongue, you cut grooves in both edges of the board and cut a strip of wood from other stock that will fill both grooves and lock the two boards together. _________________
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My problem with reusing flooring is getting the nails out within my expected lifespan. How did you manage that trick?
They were hand-driven finish nails, so they come right out (no spirals). We just had to hit and point side and pull with a claw hammer. (The only fairly easy thing about the project so far.)
phil and kathleen
Nippers are a wonderful tool for an assist in denailing.
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When I salvage and re-use wood flooring, I re-mill the T&G edges too.
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Before & after
Use a carbide paint scraper
You'd be well advised to pick up a moisture meter if you want to reinstall it, unless there is a lot of room in the house to let it aclimate.
Essentially what you are talking about is using flooring that would get tossed in the cull pile if we were putting down new. Used wood that's not better than wood we wouldn't use, is still wood we wouldn't use.
As for planing or scrapping and reusing, I'd have to hire someone willing to work for dirt cheap to make it worth while. Letting old wood near new planer blades is asking for trouble. Personally, I don't see the advantage of planing over sanding in place once it's laid since it has to be sanded regardless.
I'd be shocked if anyone lets old flooring near their shaper or planer blades that hasn't been run through a metal detector and has been scraped to remove any sand that has been worked into the wood joints through storage or when installed.
Have you priced new unfinished maple? $3/sqft buys pretty usable stuff.
Personally I say it goes in the landfill.
Beer was created so carpenters wouldn't rule the world.
Use old blades thats for sure, but I found planing gave better results.
I was able to sort out usable pieces and trim pieces that had some
potential more quickly. If the salvaged wood was never resanded
after its original installation I wouldn't bother planing it. I agree
with the concept of tossing the old flooring. I found using the old
stuff to be uneconomical unless labour costs were not a factor,
I was patching or some other special circumstance
Edited 8/16/2007 8:16 pm ET by sisyphus