Pine floor

[Ed Lang]

I did not want to hijack the other thread about hardwood floor, so I started this one.

After reading the entire thread, it seems that the Rotex and vac might work. I have lots of heart pine that my wife and I reclaimed from a barn last year. She wants that for floors in our house. I need to make the flooring from it and then lay it, sand and finish. HELP! I have with I think is all of the equipment to make the flooring and I can borrow the air nailer. She likes BLO on the stuff when playing with finishes in the shop. Again, help on making and finishing this stuff.

Thank you

[Jim Marshall]

Ed, I did restoration work in the old homes built in the early 1800s for a bunch of years. I have made the flooring before with a shaper and also even with a router. I used a tongue and groove bit for the milling. We installed it with an air powered floor nailer. We did not do the finish on the flooring but hired it finished. Our finishers would take a scraper and scrape the sides (T&G sides) of the flooring heavily after it was laid. It would give the appearance of each board being rounded to make it look old. It took some time to do the scraping but the floors looked like they had always been there and looked fantastic.

[Dev Emch]

Hey Ed and Jim...

Forgive me for asking a dumb question here. But how did they do the old pine floors? Are we talking about antique wide plank or are we talking about the normal type of strip flooring which is 2.25 or 3.25 in in width?

On some of the antique wide pine plank floors, I have noticed that the floors are face nailed with rosebud or cut nails.

So what type of flooring are you after?

As to running your own strip flooring.... if you have the lumber, go for it. You can use either a shaper or a router table. It does make life much easier if your running a power feeder but I know one guy who ran all the flooring in the top floor of his house without one. He used a small delta shaper to do the whole job and he used salvaged timber as well. Its a lot of work but there is nothing magic about the process. Typically, I find the guys who run their own flooring doing it because they got a unqiue deal on the lumber. If you have to buy the lumber, you will find that there is not much of a cost savings in running the flooring yourself as opposed to buying the same species already run for flooring.

[Kelly C. Hanna]

Your floor will be very nice...I love Heart Pine. Wish I could help with the mechanics, but I don't do hardwood floors.

[Frank Hagan]

My BIL had a wide plank pine floor put in, and finished it himself. He distressed it first, in part because he knew it would get dinged anyway, and in part because that's the look he was after. He used a light stain on it, and left it at that. No kids, so he's not afraid of ground in dirt.

I think BLO would be a good choice for a finish; easily touched up and repaired.

[Jim Becker]

Dev, the wide pumpkin pine floors in our home are face nailed with cut nails. The flooring in the older (250 yr) section seems to be T&G, but the material used in our great room that the previous owner built in the early 1980s has plain edges (no T&T) with gaps that are about the same width as the older flooring. Most of the flooring is about 10" or so wide.

[lou sansone]

For what it is worth, many of the 18th century homes built in Connecticut used hard pine ( some call it heart pine, virgin pine, pumpkin pine ) for the upstairs and often in the from parlors, but often used oak in the keeping room. According to my own experience and of Frederick Kelly ( acknowleged expert on Connecticut 18th century homes - check out his classic book " early Domestic Architecture of Connecticut" ) flooring was ship lap and not T & G in the 18th century. This is not to say that there are not instance of T & G in 18th century homes in other regional locations as some have indicated. As othes have said, the floors are always face nailed with 2 or at the most 3 nails per row. Many of the floors in my circa 1730 house are original ( they still have consecutive roman numerals scribed in the face of each one and the taper from one end to the other as a tree tapers from the butt to the tip ) and have a "L type or T type " head as opposed to a rose bud head. I personally find that the rose bud head tends to cause more problems in the long run, but it is personal preference and it is pretty hard to find L head or T head nails. The purist tends not to put any surface treatment on the wood, but I like BLO as a compromise.

have fun
lou

[Jim Becker]

The ship lap makes sense, Lou. I've never removed any boards in the older portion of our home, so it could very well be set up that way!

[Walt Pater]

I've run across a couple of pre-1800 houses where the flooring is splined groove-and-groove, face-nailed with cut nails

[lou sansone]

hi walter and jim
As I mentioned in my post, there are deffinitly regional variations on flooring. I have never seen the spline in spline, but I believe you. Many of these early home builders took skills and methods from the old country and used them in the construction of these early homes. All interesting stuff..

lou

[Dev Emch]

This all makes sense. In some photos of restored work in which the wide plank floor was restored as well, one notices the use of face nailing and one also notices gaps between the boards. Not large gaps but gaps that traditional strip flooring does not have. I have also noticed that wide plank flooring sometimes has a bit of a cup to the boards. But here one needs to understand that these "defects" are actually "affects" that the modern restorer is trying to duplicate for warmth and character.

Lou... I noticed that you seem to like the use of ship lapping. You used it on your shop walls and your house seems to have it in the flooring albeit not done by you. I am courious about why ship lapping may be more popular or prevalent in your area than say simple T&G. Any technical reasons that you can think of as well?

[lou sansone]

This all makes sense. In some photos of restored work in which the wide plank floor was restored as well, one notices the use of face nailing and one also notices gaps between the boards. Not large gaps but gaps that traditional strip flooring does not have. I have also noticed that wide plank flooring sometimes has a bit of a cup to the boards. But here one needs to understand that these "defects" are actually "affects" that the modern restorer is trying to duplicate for warmth and character.

Lou... I noticed that you seem to like the use of ship lapping. You used it on your shop walls and your house seems to have it in the flooring albeit not done by you. I am courious about why ship lapping may be more popular or prevalent in your area than say simple T&G. Any technical reasons that you can think of as well?

T and G is a much better joining system than ship lap, but unfortunatly in 1730 people did not have carbide cutters and electric shapers and thicknessing planers ( which I know you know ) all they had were hand planes. Because of this "inaccuracy" in the wood thickness, simple joints like ship lap seemed to work best and did the job given the fact that a joint could be only so accurate. My house does have a modified t and g called " feather board " which is used on a couple of the decorative wooden panneled walls. Here the interior walls are formed by taking one plank and cutting a dado in the both side edges. The plank next to that on has a feather edge planed on it ( like you would do an old fashioned raised panel on a table saw or using a hand plane ). The feather edge is just that, planed down to a feather at the tip. that edge slides into the grooved plank next to it. the process is repeated with feather boards and grooved boards all along the wall. The feather edge allowed for all of the inconsistancies in the lumber dimension to be taken into account for.

I used ship lap in the walls of my shop, because it was an easy and simple solution when working with still wet lumber that was of a variety of thicknesses ( +/- 1/32" ) which would have been hard with to make work with t and g. The outer walls are t and g though.

hope this makes sense

lou