flooring mill 2nd's worth the work ?

[Clarence Martin]

Anyone get the chance to work with 2nd's from Hardwood flooring mills ? Found a place that has Maple, Walnut, Birch , Beech, Cherry and Hickory in 2nd's that they are selling cheap!!! Worth the time and effort to get them into usable boards ?

[Chris Padilla]

Only you can decide that, Clarence. Do you have the time and patience and tools and skill and space? :)

[Richard Coers]

Are they prefinished? Nothing will take off the edge of a planer blade like hardwood floor finish. They use something with aluminum oxide in the finish for wear resistance. It eats through cutters almost instantly. I found out the hard way!

[Andy Pratt]

Without knowing anything else I'm going to say it is not worth it. These are already (probably) narrow width boards, no more 3.5" wide and no more than 3/4" thick right now, that likely have 1/4" or more of waste (t&g) that you will have to rip off each side and xcut off each end to get to a "normal" board. Now factor in that they are seconds because they have some sort of defect large enough that a flooring company couldn't even sell it as "utility grade", that means that you're doing more jointing/planing/ripping to get it to normal status where you can use it for something else. I would loosely figure that a 3/4" x 3" board only nets you a 1/2" x 2" board on average, and that's somewhat best case. The longer it is, the more chance you will lose length due to the defect i.e. twist/warp.

Without knowing the details, I would guess that it is far cheaper to just buy normal lumber (possibly in a lesser grade like #1 common) from a lumber supplier than to deal with all of these reject boards.

[Tom Blank]

I can second Richard's comment regarding the abrasive effect of hardwood finish. What a sad experience in trying to recycle some nice walnut.

Tom

[Chris Padilla]

Perhaps sanding the prefinished would take the finish off and save your planer blades. I wouldn't do it by hand, either. :)

[Bob Varney]

I bought utility grade oak, code for seconds. There are a lot of short pieces lots of defects you can't see until trying to put together, then there is no finish on it. With the cost of finish, buying 20-40% more for unuseable stuff( tounge broke, grove half gone ect.)
and time. It would be just about the same as the good stuff.

Bob

[Tai Fu]

If you got it for free, then it's not a bad deal. I made a workbench top with hardwood floorboards that was thrown out by a neighbor years ago and there are lots of waste. I needed to mill off almost 1/8" of materials to make it usable and the finish really dulls planer blade quickly (I used the Wagner Safe T Planer for this). It was a lot of work to mill and laminate the whole thing and then you have to flatten the entire top, which is necessary unless you have a way of gluing things up with perfect accuracy. I was able to get a 2.5" top but the tongue and groove really make things hard.

[Greg Portland]

Anyone get the chance to work with 2nd's from Hardwood flooring mills ? Found a place that has Maple, Walnut, Birch , Beech, Cherry and Hickory in 2nd's that they are selling cheap!!! Worth the time and effort to get them into usable boards ?
I bought a few hundred pounds of maple (each piece was about 4/4, 3-4" wide, ~3ft long) for $30. It was not finished & had minimal inclusions (these were offcuts from long boards). I've used it for small projects but I also use it for shop jigs, etc. I agree that you should avoid the pre-finished boards.