Some questions on wood floor underlayment, etc.

[mrcaptainbob]

Hayzee, that's what I was thinking, too. And the bowtie itself could be cut in a long strip and then cut to lengths as needed. These would really look neat. Almost like inlay. Speaking of floors...I worked with a propainter many decades ago. He was telling me about leaving oak flooring out on the ground for a year before it was installed in a 'fancy-shmancy' house. Since there were'nt enough worm holes as desired, they had to hand drill some more. After the floor was layed and sanded, they painted it black an wiped it clean after a short time. Then they painted it white after the black dried and then wiped that clean. After that dried they put several coats of varnish to it. Sounds pretty exotic....

[LazyPup]

A few years ago I had a chance to help install the flooring on a school gymnasium. We used the type of flooring nailer that you manually hit with a rubber mallet.

When i worked on that project biscuits had just recently come on the scene and they used biscuits to interlock the ends of the boards and the flooring nailers on the runs.

I remember that the flooring nailers could only nail the boards up to about 18 inches from the last wall, but for the life of me, i dont recall how they secured that last 18 inches.

I had a chance to see one of the pneumatic floor nailers work today. The flooring guys told me they dont really care for it and only use it on cheaper jobs.

The old style manual flooring nailers have a big rubber bumper on the top of the hammer head. It is set down on the face of the board and as you strike the hammer it jams the board down and back against the next one before it sets the nail. In that manner they get a very tight fit.

The pneumatics only drive the nail, they dont have that ram in place function and according to the flooring guys it is very difficult to learn how to get the flooring tight.