square-edged floor boards

[namluke]

Hi,

I need to lay some square edged floor boards but alot of them are cupped.

Can i lay them with a slight cup?

Can i place and lay them "c" side down as shown in the picture?

Thanks in advance for your help!

 

[wdwerker]

C side down would be best but your not going to get good results. Are these tongue & groove boards ? Are you going to face nail ? Planning on sanding the tops flat ?   

I might consider cutting a kerf along the center of the C side, but this may be easier said than done.

[namluke]

The board are square edged, so will butt up against each other.

I am going to nail them with clasp nails (old school type ones) and was also thinking about using an adhesive were the board sits on the joists. 

Once down i will be sanding all the boards.

 

 

[wdwerker]

Have they acclimated to the space ? Have you checked the moisture content ? Is this hardwood or soft ?

[Sawdustdad]

These are directly on joists? What is underneath? conditioned space? Any vapor barrier? Lots of stuff to consider.  Is this finished flooring or subflooring? (1 x 6s at a 45 deg. angle was common for years as a subfloor).  

Joist spacing? flooring perpendicular to joists? Wood species?  and dimensions? 

There is a reason square edged boards are not used for finished flooring. Actually, several reasons. Tell us more about what you are doing. 

[namluke]

It's Victorian pinewood, they are the same boards that's been in the house for about 100years. I had to take them up to do some work. So I think they are definitely acclimatised

[Tom King]

We have square edged Heart Pine flooring in our house.  I didn't intend to put it down like that to start with.  It was tongue and groove roof sheathing on a mid 19th Century railroad station.  It was so hard, and impossible to get together tightly,  that I decided to rip the tongue and grooves off, and face nail it.

We have plywood subflooring on 2x joists.  The boards are about 6 inches wide.  We face nailed two cut nails on every joist, and of course,  ends met on a joists.

To get them all tight, we just laid them out in the pattern we wanted, screwed a 2x10 down to the joists, about every four feet, and wedged the boards all tightly together.  Once the were tight, they were nailed in place, and the 2x10 moved to the next section.

I hate how puttied holes look, and owned my own drum floor sander then, so I decided to see if it would knock the heads down even with the floor.  Surprisingly, it didn't wear out the sandpaper much faster than just sanding an Oak floor.

It did leave a bump around each nail head, much like a hundred year old floor that had been walked on for that hundred years, but no metal left sticking up at all.

The floor was finished with Moisture Cure Urethane.  

I built this house in 1980, and the floor has never been refinished.  It shows some wear, but probably not as much as you might expect, and since the rest of that part of the house is made from old materials, it fits in fine.

Since the old Pine had been cooked for 150 years on the railroad station roof, it has been amazingly stable.  We see very little expansion and contration through the seasons, and certainly nothing objectionable.  The boards were toenailed over the tongues, that we ripped off, so there are no old nail holes in it.

You can see a glimpse of it on this page:   http://starbornhavanese.com/Briopage.html