Gym flooring for shop?

[Jesse Busenitz]

I searched and didn't come up with anything significant.... but has anybody used old gym flooring in there shop? Pros/cons? thx Jess

[Charles R Johnson]

what form of wood is the flooring? Is this in a new shop or existing? I would definitely prefer a wood floor over concrete. Proper installation is going to be much more labor than concrete.

[Jason Roehl]

If you're looking for used gym flooring, there are some potential issues. If it was not sequenced upon removal, you don't want it. The refinishing it has undergone over the years leaves the individual planks at varying thickness. Running it through a planer would be difficult and time consuming because the nails/cleats are difficult to remove. Many may be broken off, leaving just a nib sticking out the bottom. Or, if you re-install it, what may seem like small differences in thickness will take a very long time to sand off, even with the best floor sanding equipment.

[Jesse Busenitz]

I had seen some on CL and as bad knees run in my family, I'm thinking if I get serious about WW it'd be nice to get off concrete.....thanks for the comments Jason... some things I hadn't pondered yet.

[Stew Denton]

Hi Jesse,

When I was in high school, I worked for the school as a janitor. In the summer we refinished floors, painted, etc., and the full time janitors talked about gym flooring. When the flooring gets warn, they hire folks to sand, repaint, and refinish it. They talked about guys who had done the job with a minimal of stock removal, and guys that did a lot of stock removal....how well they could do varied a lot.

That said, I suspect that the flooring stays down until it has been sanded, repainted, and refinished until it is too thin to be done again, at which point it is replaced. Thus, my guess that good used gym flooring may be hard to come by, unless they want to replace the wood with something else, perhaps.

I have worked with used oak flooring from a house that had burned. The owners let me go in an pull up the old flooring. I still have some, and used some for the top of a big roll around tool cabinet. I put it down over plywood, filled the gaps, and then belt sanded it down. It looked pretty good. You may be able to find some used oak flooring by either checking with remodelers or checking with people who tear down houses...sometimes cities condemn houses and have them torn down. It is pretty time consuming to take up without ruining.

I can bet any type of wood would be a lot more comfortable then concrete. I work in a lab, with concrete flooring, that has tile on it. We have vinyl coated foam rubber mats on the floor in front of the benches, and it makes a huge differences.

Stew

[Stew Denton]

Hi All,

I would disagree with Jesse. I've been involved with floor sanding, even if it was a long time ago. If you can rent a big floor sander, a room the size of one found in a house, can be sanded in less than a day.

In the little town where I lived in college, the local lumber yard had a big floor sander you could rent, and they sold the floor sanding paper. It amounted to a huge belt sander with a handle that you ran standing up. In those days, flooring lumber was just plane raw hardwood flooring lumber, and you would nail it down, and then it had to be sanded. There were small differences in height, etc., and these had to be sanded down, then the floor was stained, and finally finished.

My point is that if you can get your hands on a regular floor sander, it is no big deal to sand down a floor. I will tell you, though, it takes some skill to do a good job with a floor sander, and you can ruin flooring if you don't know what you are doing. However, just taking your time with the sander and taking many light cuts over the floor will go a long way toward making up for experience.

For what it's worth, I would check into the used gym flooring. If it's no good you can figure out that pretty quickly. I think a lot of the gym flooring I have seen is maple or similar lumber.

Stew

[Jim Andrew]

I learned a easy way to remove flooring from a uncle who used to take down houses and use the lumber to build new rentals. You take a piece of flooring and cut a very low angle from nothing to thickness in about 3 or 4 ". Cut several of these and drive them under the floor at 90 degrees from parallel, and put them about every 2', and use a big hammer to drive each of the angled pieces under the flooring a little at a time each. The flooring just lifts up and you can pick it up. If you don't care if your flooring is not perfectly the same thickness, just put it down and use it. If the slight difference in thickness bothers you, you can rent a floor sander. I've seen shops where they laid flooring, and did not bother to sand or finish it.

[Chris E Smith]

I installed a 40'x18' floor of used maple gym flooring on a plywood subfloor for a workout space above my shop. This material when new is about 1" thick and the salvaged material I purchased was close to that. The biggest problem I had was having to scrape off the old finish that had seeped between planks in the prior installation. I had to scrape the edges to get a good fit before nailing with a manual cleat flooring tool. We liked the school colors and random court outline colors interspersed with the finished maple so much that we never finished the floor (what can I say, I live in Austin Tx ). With the exception of a few places I sanded the edges of some high strips I have done nothing else to the floor. It's smooth enough that I practiced martial arts barefoot on it for many years. During installation I also found it necessary to improvise some clamps to pull the strips tight before nailing. The floor turned out great and would make a wonderful shop floor. I was going to do my house too but the prospect of having to put the plywood subfloor on concrete deterred me. I didn't want to be tearing it back up in the future if I have a below slab plumbing leak or some other leak disaster in the house.
Chris