Making Wood Flooring

[Momatt]

Hello All, I'd like to ask your thoughts on something I am considering.  I just bought a 434 acre piece of property in SW Missouri.  Its got 300+ acres of pretty decent red and white oak timber.  I am building a house on the property and already have a sawmill a small crawler and tractors that I can harvest logs with.  If I build a virginia tech solar kiln or two, I think that I could probably saw and dry the 2500 sf or so of wide plank oak flooring my wife wants in our house.  Step two would be to run it though a 4 sided moulder planer like a woodmaster or maybe one of those woodmizer mp260 or mp360 units.

I dont know how important it is to have a tongue on the endgrain and these machines do not do that.  I don't know if they can straighten a board or if they all have to be ripped with a saw first.  I dooubt Ill save much but we'd like the wood to be from the land, and I'd like to have the machine.  I have a son that I think maybe I would set him up with a little cottage industry cutting, drying and milling flooring and selling it around town as a summer job.  Be some great skill building in a lot of areas.  With logs free to him, if he could make 5 or 10 grand a summer it would be a great experience for him.    It would make a strong man out of him, milling on my EZ boardwalk 40 manual mill is not for the faint of heart with logs any bigger than 18 to 20 inches.  

[Don P]

You will need to straightline ahead of the molder. The requirement for end matching strip flooring came from the building code years ago for a single thickness floor. If there was no subfloor, the strip flooring applied directly to the joists, then the flooring needed to be end matched. Since that time many folks think it is a necessity. Depending on how wide a plank we are talking about it might not be a bad idea to have something there though. It can be done with a couple of routers or even a biscuit joiner.

[Southside]

You will absolutely need to straight line your blanks before they go into the moulder, and your sawmill won't be accurate enough.  Been there, done that, and now I have a customized Riehl edger to do the job correctly.  

How wide is wide?  

[scsmith42]

I've found that When making flooring blanks we get acceptable quality using our Woodmizer edger in lieu of the straight line rip saw. Plus the edger is faster.

My moulder is a "straightening" model, which takes around 1/16" off of the back edge of the board while it crosses the first head. This addresses any slight variations in the blanks.

[MikeON]

Here is how my Woodmaster planer worked out as a straight line rip.  I then tongue and grooved the boards on a 3 HP shaper.  No problems at all with lack of straightness.
https://forestryforum.com/board/index.php?topic=95648.msg1738320#msg1738320

[kantuckid]

Going back to "how wide is wide"? best ask yer wife how much of a board gap she'll live with before you go too wide. The gap has little to do with the spending of large sums on whichever machine to work the lumber.
My timberframe addition is mixed red & white oak off our land, T&G on a router table after hand jointer edging and table saw rips to gain common widths and straight boards. I didn't go beyond 10" but mostly 6-8" flooring. We like it, it matches a rustic log/timberframe home but yes there are gaps as the heating seasons ends then back together each humid summer season-all in an A/C'd home.
I didn't do anything to my ends and they're not an issue either. I used Waterlox varnish on my additions floors. it's not a urethane and deepens oak as no poly can. I remember well the call I'd made to the mfg in ~ 2002/3 to ask about using their product on floors. The man on the phone said his had been done around 25 years prior and still looked like the day he put it on. He was right!
The mixed wide oak boards in my old log part of the home were put down in 1980 from what was called "KD, reject/export oak. Generally speaking it's oak that no longer meets the grade it was assigned prior to the kiln and is gleaned from what goes to Europe, etc.. It is/was much cheaper than buying machinery. That same source, a huge hardwood processor now manufactures hardwood flooring themselves as do some in MO-or at least that used to be a MO business? 
I did that flooring on the same jointer I still own with it sitting on whats the backporch. The table saw was in whats now the kitchen. The tablesaw was what i could afford and a true piece of you know what that I crated and shipped back to the seller when i was done. 
Might consider also looking at the many niche market places now mfg. wide board floors online? Part of the tear down old barns for lumber business models seen lately.
My wife maintains our homes all wide board oak floors using the Orange=Glo hardwood floor wax from Walmart-works great.
Does your Son share your enthusiasm for being in the flooring business? ;D
I know what our three sons (not at all lazy boys or electronic fiends as many nowdays) would have said...

[GeneWengert-WoodDoc]

After sawing the lumber, you need to air dry and kiln dry the wood to 7.0% MC.  Otherwise, the wood will dry in the house and leave large cracks.  You also need to stress relieve the wood, called conditioning, in the kiln in order to get straight pieces.  As white oak shrinks more than most other species in the dry humidity in the winter and swells in the humid summer, you need to get the MC right.  It is also advisable to dry at 150 to  160 F to kill insects and eggs.  

End match is nice, but is not totally necessary.

Why is most oak strip flooring about 2" wide?  Because wider width move enough to create annoying cracks between the pieces that attract dirt and do not look nice.

[firefighter ontheside]

I like that you asked this question.  My wife wants to take out the carpet in our bedroom and put in hardwood flooring.  I would also like to make it myself.  I'm only needing about 400 sqft.  I may use some assortment of woods, including walnut and oak.  I like the idea of wider boards so its less work to shape, but as was mentioned the cracks will be bigger with wider boards.  I may do about 3" or maybe even a few sizes to reduce waste.  The wider your boards are, the more important it will be for them to be straight.  You can easily pull a 2" piece straight, but something like 8" will put up a fight.  I'm about 35 miles south of Stl and mill with my LT15 manual.  I would likely just T & G with my router table.  I've thought about whether I would put a little chamfer on the edges or not.  I think with a chamfer, sanding perfectly is not as important.  I did that with my original downstairs floor and that was a huge hassle.

[alan gage]

A couple years ago I put down a few hundred square foot of my own ash flooring. I already had a good subfloor so to keep from messing up door clearances I made it 1/2" thick and face nailed with butt edges. I used 3 different widths from 1 1/2" to 3" to make best use of the boards. Mine was air dried outside and then finished in the basement (with wood stove) down to around 9%.  If I take the time to stop and look I can notice gaps in the winter. I'm happy with it.

It was a lot of work and I couldn't believe how much waste there was. I'll run down the process I used and include the things I'm doing differently now (putting down another 400 square feet this winter).

I'd heard that flooring manufacturer's use lower quality logs and just cut out the defects. I thought that sounded like a good idea so that's what I did. I can only assume their methods for dealing with the resulting crooks and warps were better than mine. Use better logs.

After air drying outside (11.5%) I put them on the mill to straight line one edge. Then I ran them through a planer and then setup my Woodmaster as a gang rip saw and cut the boards to width. Then I stacked them in the basement for final drying.

This didn't work out so good as the boards continued to move as they dried the last few percent and a good portion of my straight boards turned out to be not so straight after all (which greatly contributed to the waste). There was also some movement from the boards coming off the rip saw due to stress. The crooked 1 1/2" boards were easy to flex into place. Not so much with the 3" ones.

This time I'm doing the final drying of the boards in the basement (they're stacked down there now) before any further processing is done. When they come out of the basement I'll plane them on both sides and then run one edge over the jointer before ripping to final width(s) on the Woodmaster with ripsaw attached. I'm hoping this will result in straighter boards with much less waste and easier install.

It will be a mix of ash and white oak. I sawed these floor boards from some ugly rough sawn 2x6 boards and am hoping to salvage 4" wide boards after straightening (jointer) and cutting to final width. I'll still be cutting around plenty of knots.

Alan

[alan gage]

Almost forgot: I figured that when I was done I could probably just sand the floor with my ROS and skip renting the big floor sander. That was not the case however. There were inevitable small discrepancies in thickness and imperfections in the floor which telegraphed through. So I had to use the big drum sander. Not a big deal though.

Alan

[kantuckid]

About 15 yrs ago I responded to a classified ad in the newspaper, guy said he had wormy chestnut boards to sell. I asked him if he REALLY knew the wood as many don't and think oak is chestnut-I'd been down that road before. He offered to bring me a few boards to look at and was actually thinking he'd sell chestnut, and spend that money on wide board flooring. Turned out he had zero chestnut but instead it was mixed oak, tobacco barn siding. It was in good shape, been stored inside and had no paint to deal with either. I "let" the guy talk me into making his wide board flooring for $$$, and he had to help me on each load of lumber he brought.  I equalized the thickness, on bad side, cleaned it up on good side and edged on my 8" jointer then table saw to several widths, maybe it was 4,5,6,7's something like that. It was to run in a common width across the room, then another back and forth. He installed it with my instructions. 
 
I used Jorgenson I-bar crank handle clamps and donor block to pull on for my own wide board floors. Modern wood floor sanders are for rent and much improved over the old style like I used for my older part of our house.   

[doc henderson]

i refinished a floor for my MIL 25 years ago.  used the square buff sander.  still looks good today.  it was narrow and short oak, like 1.25 inches wide.  actually a nice look, maybe cause it was different.  

[kantuckid]

We rented and raised our sons in an old farm house here in E KY from 1975-1980 that was built in the early 1950's and had hardwood floors in the entire 2 stories. Upstairs which we didn't use much except a large BR that was my "shop" for the time, had mixed oak and beech that was ~ 3" wide and T&G. The main level had mixed oak same ~ 3" widths with a beech thrown in now and then. One small bedroom that we used as a nursery (think about three babies under 3 yrs old at once ;D) and had what I think were sweet gum floors unlike any floor I'd ever seen! 
The house had been built then mostly abandoned after built as my landlady became widowed and her kids had grown and gone so she moved to a nearby town, was in her late 90's when we rented it so I talked to one of her older sons about all matters about the house as they sheltered her from decisions, etc..
 The initial deal was that I'd sand/finish the floors for the first time and paint the drywall for the first time, fix the other stuff like back porch floor and get half priced rent for first year. We paid $60 month when the full amount. The water was a dug well, nasty cistern style well that didn't make any ground water. Gas floor furnace from main line running through the front yard was an extremely low rate for that reason-maybe $3-5 range monthly in the winter. It was an idyllic setting other than the water and that we both lost our jobs toward the end of the stay there due to a prison closing. Last two years I was back at work, same employer and building our home too. Meanwhile her grandson was pestering me to get my house done cause he was out of college and anxious to move in there-where he still lives. He was enough of a PITA that I barely speak to him to this day! I guess he also got the 6-700 acres of heavily wooded ridgeland too. 
If I'd have owned that place (in my dreams) I'd have built near the old house and torn it down as it was a shoddy build trying for a modern home as it were.
There had been a CCC camp on the land which had two large waterfalls, one where the CCC camp had their dump and a huge pile of rusty tin cans piled next to a picture stop for sure! 
They had used water from a huge spring that boiled up from the limestone and ran over solid rock down toward a stream full of smallmouth bass. And there we were hauling water up the hill?   

[peakbagger]

There used to be Ethan Allen sawmill near me in Andover Maine. When they were slow they would reprocess scraps and ends from the furniture stock into 3" by 12" T&G boards. Most were solid blocks but on occasion they may be two strips laminated. They were dimensionally right on with very few defects. It was a buck a square foot. I got a mix of oak and ash and did a floor with them. It was parallel strip but I put a herringbone pattern around the edges and diamond shape in the center with a compass rose made out of different woods I had around. I was hoping to get bit of contrast between the oak and ash but didnt get much. I used rented a random orbit to finish it. The gaps open up a bit in winter but other than that its solid. I pitty the guy who ever has to remove it as there are lot of nails holding it down.