While the wall was going up, it quickly became apparent that we needed to do something about the floors.

Anything that touched the floors came up stained a dark brown; 2×4′s, knees, tools, my oldest daughter, anything. Not so great if you are building fine furniture, although we could instantly create a 150 year old patina on a project, just by kicking it around the shop for a few minutes. A quick trip to the Home Depot rental center and we were off to the races.

I think we developed a pretty good system; a belt sander hooked up to a Oneida Dust Deputy, hooked up to a shop vac, all on a hand truck. But after looking at Oneida’s website we are not the first to come up with this system.

Here you can really see the extent of the problem. I know many of you will notice that we are sanding across the grain, but the floors have enough dips and valleys that sanding with the grain we ended up with mixed results at best.

Here are the finished results after a sealer coat, 2 coats of high gloss polyurethane (for durability), and one coat satin polyurethane (to cut down on the glare).

In this picture you will notice the darker streaks on the floor. We are not sure what caused this, but we have some theories. We think that at one time there were rows of pallet racks on the floor, and this is either where the racks were or the space between them. Either way it is really strange.

The floors are 1″ thick rock maple laid on top of 4″ thick sleepers set perpendicular to each other on top of poured concrete. One of my shop-mates, James, espoused an interesting theory that you can tell an old floor by the length of the floor boards. In a really old floor the lengths are shorter because the methods for moving the logs out of the forest were more labor intensive and therefore early lumberjacks sawed raw logs shorter to make them easier to move.

One obvious problem though is that we are going to have to refinish the machine room floor. Too bad most of the machinery is already in place.-

-CB-

Tags: Workshop

This entry was posted on Monday, March 16th, 2009 at 7:27 pm and is filed under Shop. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.