Planner thicknesser??

[Bobby Dazzles]

Hi there, hope you can help?
I have a quantity of reclaimed (oak?) flooring, bags of small blocks taken up from a floor. My intention is to plane the timber to get all the blocks neat and tidy and the same size.
Would a planer thicknesser be the way to go? I don't want to spend 100s but was hoping for a way to get the job done in preparation for laying.
Any advice is gratefully received. Thanks

 

[Sideways]

Other more knowledgeable folk will chip in but very short pieces of timber don't feed well through a planer or thicknesser.
Glue on the backs of the wood will tend to gum up the blades and bits of grit ground into the surface can chip blades and score the planer tables.
This is a messy kind of job that I would be reluctant to let near a quality machine that I used for good work because of the damage it could cause to the machine.
Maybe the answer is a cheap lunchbox thicknesser, bought cheaply, and which might only be fit for the dump by the end of the job. I don't know if these will feed pieces as short as you have.

 

[Bobby Dazzles]

Hi... Ok thanks. That was one of my concerns that A) the pieces would be too small and wouldn't feed through properly and B) whether the pieces would damage the blades too much.
May be a Band Saw of some description with a fence would sort out the edges and sizing and good old fashioned hard work to sort the top/bottom?

 

[marcros]

are these pieces of parquet flooring, coated in bitumen on the back?

I wouldn't put them near a planer or thicknesser. The length is already an issue and the blades will be shot in short order. I have never done this job, others have and can make suggestions, but I would consider a bandsaw and slicing a few mm off the back. Heat and scraping is another option but rather you than me!

 

[Bobby Dazzles]

Yes and yes #-o
I want to try and preserve the character of the top but yes, I was hoping to short cut the scraping off the back. May be I can look at a bandsaw then to do the donkey work and see how it goes. Otherwise I'll have many a winter's night in the garage :shock:

 

[deema]

I’m with Marcos, but a slightly different approach. I would make a sled that the blocks can sit on with the top against a fence and with a stop to prevent them shooting backwards. I would secure them with a couple quick release toggle clamps to hold them down. For me it would be a table saw with a blade made for composite materials I.e chipboard etc or if there is any danger of nails a pallet blade. Set your table saw fence to take of a smidge and off you go. They will all come out exactly the same thickness

 

[Jonathan S]

Band saw with a ree saw blade is your friend.....if you do try on a saw bench use a course rip blade, any blade with loads of teeth is going to get blunt very quickly and burn.

Sent from my SM-J530F using Tapatalk

 

[Neil S]

The forces from a table saw can vary including firing the wood up and towards you. You would have to find a way of making sure the wood cannot work free at all or it could become a missile.

The forces in a bandsaw are all down into the table if you let go of this wood it is unlikely to be fired straight at you. A decent bandsaw with 100+mm depth of cut will be a few hundred though.

HTH

-Neil

 

[kinsella]

I did this years ago and it sounds like your drivers are similar to mine. Reuse antique parquet floor but get the rubbish off the back the easiest way. I bought a desktop planer like this. It takes a while and is messy. I didn't worry about thickness differences as its sanded anyway. The photo version if from Rutland and around £140 I think. I sold it on eBay after.

 

[Ttrees]

How much thickness do you have to remove off them?
It wouldn't take more than a few inches cutting a contaminated piece of timber to destroy the set on a brand new blade, even an M42 blade won't hold up much longer, if any.
Saying this incase its only a sliver you need to take off, the set will get destroyed on one side, and the saw won't cut in anyway shape or form even reasonably straight, and you risk damaging the motor by not running it at full speed. DAMHIK

I've never worked with bitumen covered timber, but thinking there would be a fair amount of crud or other "modern" fillers in the mix also.

How thick is the goo?
Definitely buy a metal detector wand for yourself.

I wonder if a hand held power planer would work, maybe the blades need to be set for scraping instead.
Or an angle grinder with some sort of arbor cut angle grinder disc.

Seems like its worth a shot trying out a scrub plane if all else fails
Tom

 

[Bobby Dazzles]

It's a fair point. May be even a flap wheel on the end of a drill? It would be messy but like mentioned previously, I don't know how the bitumen would react to the friction generated and subsequent heat. This one could be trial and error I guess, I just don't want to make an expensive mistake by knackering a decent-ish machine. The main issue is getting rid of the old tongue and groove which is broken due to the hash made when removed (not by me incidentally). If I can get that trimmed and the blocks the same width I suppose I can mess about with the bitumen afterwards.

 

[Trevanion]

I'd be tempted to make a surfacing jig up for a 1/2" router and a large big as they use for large tabletops and surfaces but on a smaller scale, could even devise it to hold a few parquets solidly and surface a bunch up taking off all the bitumen in one shot. Similar to below:

As for trimming them to get rid of the old T+G your best bet would be some kind of sled/jig in the table saw to hold them securely and accurately so you could rip them without the risk of them pinching between the saw and fence.

It all really depends on what gear you've already got and seeing if you can work something out without a massive spend.

 

[Ttrees]

OK now I get you.
The tablesaw is the tool for the job.
Cut near through with the show side down and snap the last sliver off where the bitumen is.
You need to either make a jig for the tablesaw, or plane the joints to reference against the fence.
I regularly do this kinda thing, and a tablesaw blade is a lot more durable compared to a bandsaw blade.
Tom

 

[Bobby Dazzles]

So just to clarify, I've got parquet blocks tongue and groove on all sides, some worse than others and a thin layer of bitumen on the bottom. Scraping the bitumen off is time consuming but I also need to trim off the tongues where they've been broken. Ideally I'll end up with a load of rectangular blocks all the same size which can be relayed with a butt joint rather than tongue and groove.
The table saw has a more robust blade than a bandsaw. Kinsella used a bench planer with reasonable success as well. I think that's where we are...

 

[marcros]

Router table and new plywood tongues...?

 

[Bobby Dazzles]

My Christmas list is growing by the hour :lol:
I suppose so I could go the extra mile and have a go at re-doing the tongue and groove??

 

[marcros]

Again, not done it but I would consider redoing the groove all round and use a loose tongue.

 

[Bobby Dazzles]

Thanks, I really appreciate the advice. Gives me more of an understanding of what to do for the best results.

 

[Trainee neophyte]

Do you have wood fired heating?

I'm thinking life's too short. There are better, and more fun, things you could be making, than cleaning the underside of a floor. I also value my fingers, and fiddling with many, many small blocks of wood is either going to need fiddly jigs, and therefore even more time, or risky, dangerous finger-biting practices. I'm ok with doing something dangerously silly once, as you are suitably nervous, but doing this hundreds of times seems an opportunity for complacency and the A&E.

Time/cost benefits and all that. Have you seen the clock thread? That will keep you busy for a few nights. (hammer)

 

[RogerS]

I'm with TN on this.

But if you do go down any of the suggested routes, if you remove the tongues and grooves then you'll never get them to lay down properly.

Why do you want to remove the bitumen ? Could you not leave it on, and lay the blocks down on some sort of glue then sand the top surface once the glue had gone off ?