Reclaimed lumber, Filling holes.

[Warren]

In my reclaim project, I have a certain number of cants that have multiple holes drilled from wide face thru to wide face.  Apparently they were braces (?) that were originally bolted into place.  Trying to figure out how to fill the holes. First thought is to drill them out and glue wooden dowel rods in place.  My daughter asked if it would be possible to put a scab on the back/bottom of the piece and fill the holes with black epoxy?   While the epoxy would add a distinct contrast to the finished flooring, not sure the impact on resawing, planing, sanding and finishing?   Biggest concern would be that the resin would "smear" during mill work.

Anyone else have experience with filling holes and then milling/finishing over?

[beenthere]

Interested to hear more about the problem.
 
What diameter holes ? 
What thickness will the flooring be that needs finishing ? 
What do you mean by "cants" ?  
Is working with these cants with holes worth the extra expense ? 

[Magicman]

Can you make a sample and do one each way for comparison?

[Warren]

Interested to hear more about the problem.
 
What diameter holes ?
What thickness will the flooring be that needs finishing ?
What do you mean by "cants" ? 
Is working with these cants with holes worth the extra expense ?

Hole diameter approx 1/2" up to 5/8"+/-. I am thinking bore out to 3/4" and then plug with a dowel and glue.
Flooring will be finished at standard 3/4" thickness.
Cants = reclaimed wood members out of an old tobacco warehouse and a distillery.   Lengths vary from 4ft to 7ft.  Cross sections vary from 4"x6" to 5.5"x 5.5" to 4"x7".
Holes on the ends (last pic) will go away with end trim.  

I "could" resaw the cants such that the holes are horizontal. However that would end up yielding a lot of narrow ~3" stock that I would prefer to avoid.   

Can you make a sample and do one each way for comparison?

I will probably end up doing this  ^^^^.  Given the depth of experience here on the FF, I was hoping someone might jump in and say "BTDT.  Don't do that."   Or "If you do this, then do xyz..."

jump

[beenthere]

Warren
Jump right into the first phase, that is sawing these cants (or one or two of them) into the rough flooring sizes and then show us the holes, splits, solid wood remaining, and how the rough cuts look that you might fill with dowels or epoxy. That will assure you that these rough blanks are worthy of moving to the hole-filling part of the process.

I would think you will get a lot of valuable information on how far you want to proceed past the initial sawing phase. 

Anxious to see some of these cants sawn into something. Will that be happening anytime soon?

[Ianab]

Problem I see with filling the holes in the beams first is getting a decent seal on the bottom of the hole. Epoxy will seep out any hairline crack. I've done a bit of epoxy filling in knot holes in large slabs, and nail holes in reclaimed wood. Being able to tape up the bottom of the hole / crack is sometimes a challenge. It works best if you have a planed surface to work with. Once you have the holes in the boards filled, then they will plane again (to remove any excess epoxy and glued on masking tape), sand and finish normally.

It will be a bit of work as you will have to treat each hole in each board individually. I'm usually just doing one table top, or a couple of boards for a woodwork project. But if you line up a row of boards and do multiple pours in a session you should be able to get through them. You usually have to pour twice as the resin seeps into internal cracks inside the holes, so you have to top up most of them later.

Maybe an experiment where you resaw and fill one beam, and plug and resaw another? Then you can compare the results with the amount of work. 

P.S. As the epoxy is your Daughter's idea, get her to help with the time consuming stuff, the taping up and pouring.