Old Flooring - What is the glue??

[Pete Simmons]

Picked some over 100 year old oak flooring with a mahogany cover on it. It has a black paint/glue on the back. When sanded it smells like a very old house.


What is the black stuff???

[Cliff Rohrabacher]

I have torn old flooring up and found asphalt used as the adhesive.

[James Kuhn]

Man, that's tacky. :p

[Ben Grunow]

Only black glue I have ever seen is the stuff used for old linoleum tiles and much of it contained asbestos. Does it have little fibers in it?

[Jason Roehl]

It's probably a mixture of asbestos, tar, lead, mercury, DDT, Agent Orange, mustard gas and a few other nasties that will kill you if you even look at them.

Oh, sorry...I'm tired...it sounded good...:D

It's probably some tar/asphalt-based adhesive, but like Ben said, it may contain asbestos.

[Cliff Rohrabacher]

Only black glue I have ever seen is the stuff used for old linoleum tiles and much of it contained asbestos. Does it have little fibers in it?

Yah but it's harmless because it's all snaggled up in the tar.



The harm that asbestos caused happened in places where people worked daily in atmosphere that was thick with the stuff. A little here or there is nothing.

BUT WAIT there's more~!!!

Silica is the new Asbestos~~!!
Another 10 years and it'll be silica lawsuits and bans.

[Michael Schwartz]

How about gypsum, that stuff is pretty nasty on the lungs too.

[Fred Voorhees]

Yah but it's harmless because it's all snaggled up in the tar.



The harm that asbestos caused happened in places where people worked daily in atmosphere that was thick with the stuff. A little here or there is nothing.

Cliff, I have to disagree with you wholeheartedly. Your advice will more than likely end up slowly killing someone down the line. I am an asbestos worker by trade (well, at least that is what my union is called - International Association of Asbestos Workers and Heat and Frost Insulators.) It only takes a single fiber to get to where it needs to go to begin to do the damage. The fact that the fibers are "all snaggled up in the tar" is no relief from the fact that when it is sanded, such as was originally stated, it becomes airborne and thus, can easily be breathed in. I have had the misfortune of seeing some of the old time insulators in my local union who worked with the stuff without any concern for its hazards, simply because they didn't know at the time. They suffered some agonizing deaths. These days, you are required to have a license and specific training to do such a thing and personally, I begged off on that aspect of my job, preferring to stay with the insulation side of things.....not that that is much better, but I do try to use caution whenever possible.

[Tom Solomon]

Probibly tar/asphalt and maybe horsehair, I have run across this many time remodeling homes and recovering the hard wood flooring. if you look close and see some crystalizing it is probibly tar.. Very nasty stuff to get off but cleans up awsome. I have never found any asbestos in the adheasive in the flooring. alot of the old homes I have worked in have had asbestos recovery teams in them bacause of the sideing on them. Hopefully you just got a nasty case of tar to remove..