Question about making Hardwood flooring?

[wallace chapman]

Have any of you guys made your own hardwood floor planks?

Is it more expensive to make your own boards and then cutting the tongue and grooves on a shaper than buying from a retailer?

I'm trying to find out information on buying the lumber from my regular lumber supplier and making my own flooring, or is this to time consuming VS buying packaged hardwood flooring.

Would like to hear how actual woodworkers setup their own floors.


Wallace

[Chris Rosenberger]

It depends on the cost of the lumber & if you put a value on your time. You could end up with alot of waste because the width of the lumber & the width of the flooring do not always work out. This adds cost to the overall project. It will be very time consuming. Also a power feed is almost a requirement for the shaper to get the tongue placed right so you end up with an even surface when the floor is layed. With all that said. I have made alot of flooring. It has always been to match old flooring. If you have the time & tools to do it, then go for it.

[lou sansone]

Couple of thoughts come to mind. First the quanity of flooring. Second the type of material and the cost of getting it in the rough and then processing it yourself. If you have your own trees and sawmill then it might be cheeper to do it your self. I needed about 1300 bd feet for my shop floor and the thought crossed my mind. I happend to have my own saw mill ( norwood ) , but not the type of trees that I wanted for a floor (shagbark hickory ) . It turned out to be cheaper to buy from a mill that specialized in flooring and ran millions of bd ft per year than to buy the logs and mill and dry them myself and then process them to finished flooring. What I was able to get from the mill was hickory with a very slight sticker stain for about 1/4 the normal price of the wood. For a shop it was great.
lou

[Mark Singer]

I have designed the profile and had it milled....a lot can go wrong...I did not have any problems, but I have seen many...

[wallace chapman]

Let me back up a little, I wasn't thinking of sawing my own logs to cut to boards, but rather buying 4/4 lumber from my local saw mill, cutting them to length and width and running them on my shaper for tongue and groove or other appropriate connection.

For example, my local saw mill has poplar and maple selling around $3.40 bd/ft, can I take this dimensioned lumber and cut and dress the edges and that will yield floor boards or is there a step I'm missing before finishing?


I would be running a power feeder on the shaper and maybe on the table saw to speed up the cutting.

Am I oversimplifying the process of turning lumber into floor boarding?

Wallace

[Dev Emch]

I have cut my own flooring but I have a reason to do so. Often, its a limited number of unusual boards that are part of a bigger floor design.

In general, the answer to your question is a big fat NO. Flooring companies buy lumber by the semi truck full at huge price reductions. By the time you buy your stock, often, you will find the costs either equal or more expensive than the finished flooring material. In otherwords, with flooring, your buying lumber and they throw the milling work in as a bonus.

Now if you have some unusal parts or if you have some strange wood stock piled, then your better off running these items yourself.

[Roger Everett]

Wallace:
Although I'm always in favor of make your own. For standard flooring, I think the time involved in all the milling, compared with the cost of buying factory-made would not be time effective. If you do though. one thing you need not forget is to mill a relief in the center of bottom, to counter the boards tendency to cup. A look at some factory made will show what I'm talking about. However if you want to go for a design or accents in flooring you, making your own would be the best, as buying cost greatly increases with custom work. As an example, I would like to share some pics of a floor I worked on in the 90's, when I was doing architectural millwork and woodworking in an area which had some very serious ( $$ ) estates. I had spent several months doing the ceiling, as lead carp., then moved to first floor to join the guys that had started on the floor. We had 4 router tables set up, 1 w/ pattern bit to copy from pat. pcs. and 1 w/ tounge bit, grove bit, and 1 w/ a 7/8 bit for a bottom relief bit.

[Roger Everett]

Not used to the pic format on here! I might add this floor took a fair bit of time, with 3 of us making patterns and copying, routing, and fitting ( the rad. stuff), and 2 guys in garage of place milling up from rough and making the straight stock. Oh bye the way it is Lt. And dark Jarrah, Wenge , and the piping between pcs. is cherry ( 1/4" wide w/ tounge and grove ). Needless to say this gig was one where you got out of bed in the morning just wanting to get to work. It was a trip.
Roger

P.S. these were scaned from reg. pics. and the color tranfer sucks.

[Vaughn McMillan]

Roger, those are some amazing pics. My chin hurts from hitting the keyboard so hard.

- Vaughn

[Mark Singer]

Roger....Just amazing!

[wallace chapman]

Sounds like the consensus is to buy my hardwood flooring. It must be VERY time consuming in the milling process for hardcore craftsmen to push away from making my own.

I think I will take good advice and purchase the flooring. I have had a tough time trying to find any information on milling wood correctly into flooring on the internet so this may be the only alternative.

Roger, Incredible work. I can understand the desire to want to work on something that spectacular.

Thanks for the info guys.

Wallace

[Mark Riegsecker]

I am in the process of putting down a wood floor in my kitchen and had similar questions as Wallace Chapman.

In the selection of the flooring I have found are many more questions.

Is solid hardwood as some of you have mentioned a good choice or this stuff that locks together without the use of glue topped with what appears to be paper veneer or this product referred to as engineered flooring that is priced $15 and up per square foot?

Any advice here would be appreciated. I'm personally leaning toward the oak hardwood because I can't find the color needed in prefinished. However, I'm being told the engineered has many advantages.

[tod evans]

i`m getting ready to build my own composite flooring by resawing cherry and laminating it to a baltic birch substraight in 15x15 squares 1/4" of hardwood same as solid but much more stable and much easier to achieve the parquet design i`m looking for. cost effective???????certainly not. is it a better product than i could buy? i think so...just a little food for thought, tod

[George Matthews]

Wallace:
I would like to share some pics of a floor I worked on in the 90's, when I was doing architectural millwork and woodworking in an area which had some very serious ( $$ ) estates.

Now that is amazing.