The Forestry Forum

My friend is doing a black walnut floor that I am sawing for him.  How much extra raw material do we need to allow for scrap, shrinkage and general mistakes.  I am sawing at 1 and 1/8 is this good?

Yes, 1 1/8" is the thickness that I normally saw for flooring.

No expert here but 50 to 100 percent? Are you sawing to width for him? Random with? How much character will he allow? The biggest thing is how nice is the wood?

I did flooring in my bedrooms and wasn't able to process it in the optimal order of steps because of locations of the wood/shop/house so there was some movement after planing and ripping that resulted in a lot of waste. Plus that floor wasn't tonque and groove so there was nothing to help in alignment, which equaled more waste.

Last winter I did floors in my living room and kitchen. They were wider boards (4-8") but were better processed, tongue and groove, and I only cut out the worst of the knots. Hardly any waste on that floor. Part of the reason for not cutting out the knots was that I knew I might not have enough material so I was trying to stretch it. Been down 8 months and no problems yet.

If this was for my personal use I'd be tempted to saw them at 1" if I was doing narrow flooring (under 8") and they were quality logs that didn't have show stress when sawing. My planer will only take off about 1/16" per pass so I'd happily trade 2 passes through the planer for losing a couple boards that didn't clean up. My 1 1/8" boards almost always clean up at 7/8" after jointing and planing.

Alan