*
It seems a shame that everyone is slamming you and the idea. I have a beautiful [to me] wide board white pine floor. Some boards, as it happens , are 22″. I let them air dry for about three years. Brought them in the house one winter [ I believe timing is critical] and t
lIt them aclimate for a month, shiplship lappedmthemh router] and screwed and plugged them about 2″ in from the ends. They’ve been don for 6 years. Yes they are still “alive” and shrink and swell by the seasons about 1/4″. Now you’all may think I’m lucky or crazy, but the fact is it has worked … no buckling, no cracking.
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*
*What about em Frenchy?
*Yeah. Ditto. Are you trying to start something Frenchy?
*absolutely, I think it'll work
*Them dam spiders have changed thier appetite, now they're eatin internet posts !!!!!
*Just saw this at Knots. Wants to use 22" burl oak, fastened on centre from underneath (accomodating wood movement, apparently). I'm trying ever so hard to avoid saying something ever so offensive.
*Hey what is this, I come here to talk wide boards and I get this?
*TWENTY TWO INCH!!! I retract my earlier post, sounds like trouble to me.Come on Adrian, what were ya gonna say?Chuck
*Well spit it out over here on the wild side old buddy! Hell, it's Friday night, let er rip!
*(you bearded cabinet makers always stick together like that?)
*My opinion, that's a flat out disgusting waste of fine material, and completely ill considered as far as the function of a floor goes. Sort of thing a designer comes up with, without considering for an instant the nature of the material. I'm MAD, dammit.Actually, I think it's a joke. has to be a joke. Please let it be a joke.
*J cl B if your clean shaven i hate your guts forever. No make that about 9 nanoseconds.
*That wasn't much of a rant, bro. You're slippin'.
*The bearded clique! THAT'S what that guy was talkin' about!
*Ok. What kind of a person takes lumber from a tree that that has thrived for many generations (to yield a 22" board), and through adversity and providence gained , by way of burl, one of the most striking and beautiful appearances possible in this marvelous material, and lays it down as a damn floor? Not even taking into account that 22" just plain will make a crappy floor, as anybody who has worked with wood can tell you? An eedjit. Take your money (you must have gobs of it it) and lay down a nice, utilitarian floor of regular oak, or cherry , or whatever: it will still be beautiful, and do a good job in it's intended purpose. Slap a couple of rugs on it, arrange the furniture, and live on it. Leave the special stuff for...special stuff. Still stuffing all kinds of rant back down my gorge; just reconsider, ok?
*Only if the beards are allowed to get too close to each other.
*He'll probably glue it down as well as use screws. In less than six months the edges will have curled up and it will crack at the screws. Then they will complain that the damn stuff makes a worthless floor, tears it out to put in a ulitarian floor, ripping it to shreads in the process.
*I'm so with you on this Adrian. I'd add that while I concur that it is retarded to use 22" boards for flooring, and not only because of problems, I think plank flooring looks good because of the lines created by smaller widths, otherwise why not lay out sheets of frikkin' plywood?But what a waste...MD
*You know, there really is someone at the same thread at Knots saying "use a good quality floor glue" or something like that?
*Well after my last couple trips over there, I don't trust myself, but I'm thinkin' someone should go over and reassure the guy that he can always caulk it if he has a problem later.
*Yeah, and then he could paint or lay down a vinyl flooring.
*O.K. guys, What would you do with 22inch wide burl oak boards? please don't tell me to saw them up and make cabinets or something with them! for pete's sake they are 22 inches wide and ten feet long! Figuring waste that's well over 600 bd.ft. I'll give a board to the person that comes up with the best use for them.
*Frenchy, it seems to me there are an infinite number of things one could make with wood like this (particularly furniture). I'm not among those that think it would be a sin to use it "just" for a floor. If that's where your heart leads you, go for it, heeding the experienced advice proffered here already.To my eye, I think 22 in wide flooring would look, well, unusual. But that's my eye. I think 22 inch wide anything is crying out for a more prominent display. Maybe raised panels on a wall in a dining room, or entryway? Or as raised panels in interior doors, or large cabinet doors? Or as recessed panels in a coffered ceiling?Hmmm, quaffing a pint of homebrew, leaning back in a favorite chair, admiring 22 inch wide burl oak panels on the ceiling. That would work for me!
*Frenchy; sorry if I reacted too strongly to your post. Until you came back, I wasn't sure this wasn't a joke. I still believe you would be very unhappy with the performance of your floor, due to the large degree of wood movement to be expected in boards that dry; this would in my opinion be compounded by the fact that you are airdrying them yourself (going by your last post at Knots), and then installing them in a presumably modern home with central heating of some kind. You would either see the plywood splines during the dry seasons, or if you glued them, you would get significant cracking somewhere.Are the boards sawn 'through and through' (livesawn is another term; meaning log is simply sliced into boards, some of which contain the centre of the log)? If so, those boards are even more unstable.I can see your dilemma as to finding the best use for them. My first response is : furniture. But how many dining tables to you need? Maybe you could keep what you require, and swap the rest to somebody else for some equivalent special lumber in another species when it is good and dry. Even in furniture, 22" boards are very problematic though. maybe a combination of panelling and furniture; keep the two best boards for a table top, and trim out the room with the rest (I know, that means cutting it up: but the chance to do a whole room in lumber matched for colour and grain is also highly desirable. Maybe think about having some boards resawn for veneer for panels, and cut around defects in other boards for framing material). Good luck.
*or what about this? If you still want to use it as flooring, rip each wide board into 2 or 3 narrower boards, keep track of them, and lay them in sequence so the grain matches up as it did when it was whole. You get the same effect, but the boards are much more stable (and even at 8-11", that's pretty wide flooring).
*Yo Adrain - so what are ya gonna do with that board ya earned? ;-)
*If I was as empty headed as your reply suggests, would I go looking for help first? O.K., What would you do with over 600 bd.ft. of very beautiful burl oak? boards as wide as 22" and 10 ft. long? please don't suggest that I cut it into pieces and make a table or something as mundane.
*I understand how tough dealing with swelling / shrinking is but the chance to display that beautiful wood in a prominant fashion like a floor is just too hard to resist. To answer Adrian, yes some is sawn thru and thru, but most of the really wide boards came from logs that were too wide to do that. The saw mill only uses a 50inch blade. What if I used a 6" hard maple to picture frame each peice of burl oak. I'd have 22" burl,6" maple,22" burl, 6"maple etc. P.S. To fasten it I'd use deck screws installed from the basement up thru the sub floor, about every 6 inces o.c.
*Well, let me think about that. In the meantime, let me ask you this; how do you plan to dimension those boards, especially to the tolerances necessary for splines, if you go that route? There aren't many shops with the gear to do it properly (running it through a planer will just giver you a thinner board with all the original twists and cups etc), and even if a shop has a jointer wide enough to surface 22", the 10' means it would have to be a honking big jointer. A shop with a thickness sander may be your best bet there.My experience has been, even if you dimension it perfectly flat, it will start moving around again immediately; I made a reproduction oak chest for a historic site once, and even with well dried wood, it cupped and twisted almost immediately. I had to clamp it flat to dovetail it, and that was only 16 or 17 inches. I doubt you are going to be able to dimension it, rout for a spline over 10' lengths, and get it together. Not trying to be negative, just an honest opinion.I really think ripping it into two or three wide boards will give you the best combination of a beautiful visual effect, and a floor that accomodates some of the movement that you can expect (plus, it won't be as difficult to dimension accurately). When you look down at the floor, it will still be really obvious that the boards were originally very wide. It may even look better, with the smaller gaps between the boards, than with the 22" boards. I think it would be very striking.
*If you check FHB #96 (july of 95) you'll see what I'm thinking of. On the back cover are some 40" wide black walnut boards used for flooring,they are using cork as expansion joints.Since Oak expands .00180 in the radial direction (quarter sawn) and .00365 tangentially (plain sawn) perhaps the burl would cause it to average it out and be somewhere around .00270 then if I calculate the differance between the 20% moisture in the winter and the average of over 90% moisture on a humid day in the summer I get a total movement of.208 inches from those 22" boards. Now over the 20 ft of the whole room that's over 2&1/4 " Yet when I see floors laid with typical 6" to 8 " wide boards and they are slamed together as tight as they can be when they are put down they only leave 1/4" to 1/2" around the whole thing. Iv'e tried to put a .002 feeler gauge between the boards and they don't fit so there can't be that much movement. what's up?
*Empty headed is as empty headed does.
*Wait a minute guys, since I will be putting them over a tamarck sub floor with a tangential change coefficient of.00259 won't the relative dimensional change be the differance between burl oak and tamarck? S.W.A.G. (scienctific wild assed guess) tells me that burl oak growth rates would be something between the radial growth and tangential growth of white oak which is .00180 radial & .00365 tangential, or about .002725. Thus while my whole floor will shrink or swell according to humidity the differance should amount to .00013 multiply that times 22" and the differance would be less than .003,per 1 percent change in humidity. If the humidity was 40% higher or lower than when the floor was laid down the maximun expansion/contraction would be .1188 or less than 1/8th of a inch for a 22" board. I know plywood subfloors change things because of the cross ply arrangement of plywood , but there won't be any plywood.
*Looky guys, he's a mathmagician !!!!Hey frenchy, can you do pie are square, too ???
*Look, You strike me as one of those guys that comes up with all this techno mumbo jumbo to try and not only justify a move in the stupidity spectrum, but make everyone else think you've done your homework on the subject at hand. Whats all this crap with feeler guages and micromiters? You building a race motor or a floor? I've been doing floors since the 8th grade, (ran across one with baseball spikes and learned the hard way)and I've never seen a floor with 22" wide boards and could only imagine the problems with doing something like this, now I'll be the first to admit I'm open to learn and by all means do not know everything, BUT... there are some things in this world that are done a specific way and not questioned...WHY?..because it works that way!Because about 300 generations of woodworkers have worked out the bugs of doing some things a certain way and have paid certain penalties that we as reasonably smart carpenters LEARN from. So in closing..please send pictures of this floor about four to six months after you lay it with an enclosed total figure of money you've wasted so I may add it to my picture book of "Dumbass Thing People Do". Do yourself a favor nextime you ask a question...dont try and talk other people into the answer you want to hear!
*Luka, pie are round,,, cornbread are square.
*You've never had one of my momma's pies. Pie are square.... flat, harder than diamonds, etc.
*>"Do yourself a favor nextime you ask a question...dont try and talk other people into the answer you want to hear!"That's the one statement that puts this whole thread in a nutshell. Wish I'd said it.
*FrenchyJust to add a touch of civility to this thread, why not trade or sell what you have to someone and in turn have the floor of your choice put in.b IMNSHO, it would be a shame to use such wood as a floor when the wood could be used in raised panels, coffered ceilings, better yet some pretty nice furniture could be created and would be a prized possession for most people.PS. I would go one to one with you on Bazilian Cherry, if it is as good as it sounds (extent of burl unknown). I think you would get a real return on a swap with someone, just to get you thinking.
*Frenchy,I'll jump to your defense here. I've seen plenty of floors with 22" wide boards in them, they just happen to be really old floors, because that's when there were plenty of logs that would yield such widths. I would expect you would get gaps of about a quarter to a half inch. That's what I see in old wide-pine plank floors, but they probably move more than oak will (talking through my hat there). I do my best to restore floors like this, but there is really nothing you can do about the gapping that the seasonal movement will create. You mentioned cork. I don't know if that'll take the seasonal movement too many times without eventually just staying compressed.I've seen rope used in a magazine but have my doubts. You will be forever condemned to cleaning out the cracks, which is justifiable in trying to maintain a historic floor, but I'm not sure I would lay a new floor that would do that.I vote for paneling the library with it.Or ship it to me and I will dispose of it properly ;-)Steve
*Well before I say too much, I had better go check out the facts on the KNOTS (Knutty Nebuios Odd Transient Sahib's) page to see what's really up here.
*...wasn't that post from some guy named Wilton, Stilson...no... Wilson? Eh? Something like "Just add a pint of Gorilla Glue, and have at it, eh?"
*Oak Library... Oak raised panels... Oak Doors... I could go on.
*Now hold on a minute Mr. Zerby.I think he otta ship those boards to me. I plan on using them for--uum,uhh,lets see....,ya,roof decking --thats it. I am gonna use those 22 inch boards for roof decking! The eventual splits and cracks will be covered with shingles anyhow,so no harm done right?Stephen
*ADRIAN, your idea of cutting them into 3 boards, marking them and book matching them is the best offered so far. I hate it but it may be the most practical. I assume that you'd put them down when the humidity was between the low of winter and the high of summer. what is the upper limit of boards? Does anyone have experiance with wide boards over board sub flooring? What species of sub flooring make any differance? Flooring is more tolerant than furniture, and FHB #96 show 40 inch wide black walnut boards that aren't cupped/ warped or split. How?
*All you furniture guys with beards want to do is get ahold of some nice wide/long boards so you can cut them up into little pieces to make furniture with. Wait untill I'm done and you can have my cut offs... free!
*Wide Pine Floor FillerI need some advice on fillinf the gaps between the wide pine floorboard of a 1850's Pa farmhouse. There are gaps so wide in places that one can see clear through to the basement. Are there any flexible fillers out there besides (gulp) silicone caulk? I was thinking of just using plain old wood filler but am afraid of it popping when the boards move.
*Jerry can you get them up? If you could, then take Adrian's idea and use a router to cut grove in the side of the boards and insert a spline made from a similar wood. then no matter how much they move you wouldn't be able to see thru. I'm interested, do they move around much now after they've dried out from when they were first laid? measure a gap now and let me know how much it cloes up this summer. thanks, Frenchy
*Jerry.Two questions: How much do the boards move from fat season to thin season?Any chance you can pick up the boards and re-lay them?I've had good luck picking up the floor when possible and re-laying it during the "fat" season, butting it tight. Also gives you the chance to put in a decent subfloor that will block the drafts from the cellar and repair any framing that needs it.If you can't get them up because of partitions on top of them or whatever, then there isn't a lot you can do. I've seen people cut in patches between boards. That is, what they do is cut out about an an inch between each pair of boards they want to close the gap on and fill it tight with a strip of new (or old, for better match) wood. You can see this at the Brandywine Museum near Kennet Square, PA. I don't think it looks very good though.Or you can just do like I do at my own house and let them fill up with cat hair.Steve
*It seems a shame that everyone is slamming you and the idea. I have a beautiful [to me] wide board white pine floor. Some boards, as it happens , are 22". I let them air dry for about three years. Brought them in the house one winter [ I believe timing is critical] and t lIt them aclimate for a month, shiplship lappedmthemh router] and screwed and plugged them about 2" in from the ends. They've been don for 6 years. Yes they are still "alive" and shrink and swell by the seasons about 1/4". Now you'all may think I'm lucky or crazy, but the fact is it has worked ... no buckling, no cracking.
*F.Y.I. , a Craig Daymon provided me with The name of George Nakashima in Penn. They do wide board floors all of the time. According to their technician, from the dry of winter to humid summer they get no more than 1/16th to 1/8th inch movement per board. the only suggestion they had was to change my fastening from 6 in. O.C. to 4 in. O.C. they did recomend predrilling before installing the deck screws into the burl oak. Their phone # is 215-862-2272 It's nice to get some real information from someone that does it as a business.
*Lot's of guys that responded to your question do this as a business Frenchy. My background includes museum conservation, old house restoration, restoration millwork, reproduction furniture (seen a few wide boards), teaching woodworking at the college level (still do part time), and a fairly wide experience of making and installing wood trim, furniture, and cabinets in houses. I don't claim to have all the answers, but any comments I directed to you were based on what I've seen as a professional woodworker. Like the first responent to your update at Knots,I don't think 1/16 to 1/8 movement over 22" adds up under normal house conditions. Definitely, in my part of the world, there is just no way. I was looking at a floor a few weeks ago (10-14" boards) and there was a gap of almost 3/4" between two boards. Thinking they had probably dried as much as they were going to, I mentioned that I cut make a fill if the gap offended them. I was told the gap filled up tight when spring came, every year.I find 1/16 movement over 22" very difficult to believe, but who knows? They are good craftsmen. Or maybe you just heard what you wanted to hear.
*FWIW - I was really hoping that someone would say/pursue/explain floating the floor and how this could accomplish the task. I have floated some good sized rooms myself and if you are OK with a unusual moulding/shoe or create a overhang and reduce the bottom plate size (2x6 studs on a 2x4 plate) create a nice adjustment area.I don't advocate this for everyone, it does have a slight hollow sound and you can't put a grand piano on one. "what ever the customer want's is my motto" I only get to decide how and try to minimize them out of my designs. But I like the uniqueness of once in a while.