I Swore I'd Never Make Flooring Again | Home Renovation & Addition Part 50

hey everyone my name is Matt welcome back to our home renovation remodel Edition thingama bopper whatever we're calling it this time we're gonna take a pretty good step forward and transforming this blank space into something that looks like maybe something finished or at least get pretty close to it so we're going to be making the flooring which will be going in here if you missed the last episode I did all of the initial selection and rough I guess select cutting of a giant stack of white oak to select a bunch of riffs on boards so we'll have some nice riffs on white oak flooring here those boards are all still roughs on they have been dried and this time we will be Milling all that into actual flooring which can be installed in here and here's that pile of boards from last time which will be macheding into tongue and groove flooring and this is the machine we're going to use to do this I got this four-sided molder for my buddies Matt and Andy they got this thing uh you know I don't know like six months ago or something they haven't had a chance to use it for real they just ran a couple of test boards through it so I will be uh basically using it for the first time and figuring out how to use it but it has four heads so you have this cutter head here which is on the bottom this will cut the bottom of the board you have a spindle here this one's already got the uh the tongue knife in there so this first knife cuts the tongue on this side this spindle here will cut the groove and then as it exits here there's another cutter head up here which will play in the top of the board and if you kind of look this way you can see the fence here this is really like the reference of the entire process so whatever ends up against this fence here is uh how the board will go through so you want a nice straight edge on here on the bigger machines you might be able to get away with a little less of a straight edge to start with but to get nice straight bores which close up really nicely in the install you want to make sure that the uh your reference Edge is nice and straight and perfect as it goes into the machine so I will be going through and edging all these boards to give them a nice straight edge one of the questions on the last video was on ripping all these at the table saw if I had Edge jointed them at all and I did not so I took the rough Sun Edge right off the sawmill a little bit of snow falling off the roof so roughs on edge off The Sawmill and just threw it through the table saw to rip these to a rough width I have two widths in here I have six and three eighths rough and like four and a half rough they should finish at like almost six probably and four and mixing in the fours with the sixes will allow me to use more of the material and a lot of times if you mix them in randomly enough you can't really tell that there's a narrow row you know wherever there might be in the overall field of the entire floor so it's a good way to use you know some extra material without just having a bunch of uh a bunch of waste so I am going to get working on this pile get them all edged and at least get that stage finished up and while I'm doing that I'm also going to read the manual for this and uh calibrate it and set it up a little bit like I said Matt and Andy haven't really used it at all so I'm going to go through as if it wasn't used at all and make sure all the cutter heads are aligned to the tables and basically I'll do the whole setup process as you would do if you had just got this thing uh from the manufacturer foreign [Applause] [Music] with the narrower stuff part what I'm doing is working towards sorting the narrow boards from The Wider boards just kind of got mixed up through the drawing process I wanted to show you one little trick here I guess so I don't necessarily need all these boards to be the full eight foot long I need to have some shorter pieces for the install and as I'm working through this pile I'm taking note of the uh the boards looking for any significant Crown so this one here has got a really good bow in it so you can see if I were to straighten this out I would lose a half inch on this side and then I lose another half inch on the other side side and I'm losing an inch of material if I were to straighten this the quickest and easiest way to straighten a board is uh with a saw still this one poop cut that one in half I'll have two four Footers and we'll have almost probably a very small amount of material removed during this first straightening so now as you see me working through the rest of the stack I'll be chopping some pieces as we go making small pieces for the install and um I do have some other small pieces because we're going to need a bunch of test boards as you work towards setting up that machine [Music] [Music] [Applause] thank you foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign extra wide boards in here that are just kind of extras and there is the full width boards and these are the uh narrow width boards so we'll have at least two different runs of widths probably more like three or four different widths that will run so that's all of the rough stock kind of ready to go now to figure out how to work uh this thing so let me uh let me run you through this machine and how you you set it up because there is quite a lot going on here and I still don't quite know what I'm doing so we'll start here on this end so over here we have essentially a jointer so this is you know a cutter head it's got four uh slots in it so right now I have a knife loaded in this side and then 180 degrees from it is another knife it has the other two slots here where you can install either another pair of knives or you can use the molding Cutters in this Cuttery head as well so because we're making flooring and I want some bottom relief Cutters the the groove here will be used for the relief Cutters so we'll have a two and a half cutter head on this end the way this end of things kind of works here is we have a table and we have a step in the table so you can see this fin here and this fin over here these are actually at an offset from each other and you set the depth of cut using these filler pieces so the more of these shims you install the less material is going to be removed and I believe the maximum depth of the cut if you take this shim out will be two millimeters but the first thing I have to do is set the the blade Heights to the correct height so we want these to be parallel with the top of the table here so you can use a straight edge or a square or whatever and you can rotate the knife until it just kisses that thing I have this dial indicator knife setup tool thing so you can zero it out on a table and then bring the plunger over top of the knife and you can roll the knife through there and raise or lower the knife until it actually zeros out with the table you can see the knife is too low still so the cutter head has these Jack screws which engage with a little slot in the knife so this is the slot and the knives so there's a little screw ahead that's kind of engaged in there so when you turn it in or out it will raise or lower the knife which uh is kind of slick so with the um the plunger now on top of that knife I can adjust that screw to bring that knife up so it's level with the bed okay let me do the other side okay so those two knives are set up in this head and we'll drop the back Cutters in in a little while I am waiting on another set of these to come in so we'll do that later they're supposed to come today I want to work on the top cutter so I have the additional knives and Gibbs to put in so I have a four knife cutter head back here and we also need to check the cutter head to make sure it's parallel to the table so I think I'm gonna do that first and we should be able to do that with uh with this thing again so the dial is reading a 32 on this side we'll spin it around and see what it reads on the the other end of the cutter head so according to the dial indicator this side of the cutter head is about uh eleventh hour too high so it's in here kind of like this this kind of goofy angle so I need to loosen up these mounting bolts here and drop the uh drop this side down a little bit I think I'm going to call that good enough it's about um right there is even with the other side let me go up almost too fast I think too thou is just fine so I'm gonna tighten this back up and then we can do the the knives so I'm getting ready to install the extra knives in the cutter head and I realized that I don't have a piece that I actually need I need the knife height adjustment screws these things are the ones that grip into those uh slots in the knives and allow you to push them up and down to level them with the cutter head um I don't have any more of these screws like in the accessory bags of hardware and everything that I have so I just ordered a few more of these whenever they come in we can install the extra knives so I'm just gonna kind of Sidetrack this for now or put on the back burner this is kind of how this whole thing's been going so far it's been like I've been out here trying to set the machine up and I'm missing something or I need something and I'm waiting for something to come in that's uh that's the gist of how this has been going this machine's been in here for uh like two or three weeks already okay through the magic of time travel I have the screws I need to finish installing those Cutters so we'll grab the the knives and we'll get these actually set and installed and then we'll look at the side Cutters which it was all prepared to start talking about yeah kids look at the Jack screws and we'll get these kind of roughly where the other ones are just protruding a little past the cutter head and then we'll snug up the uh the give volts you can't get to so this is the knife setting jig that it provides so you're supposed to put this over the center of the knife and this will tell you if the knife is at the right height for the depth to cut it's supposed to take so the way that I've been doing this is I set the knife High to begin with so that the setting gauge thing rocks and then I'll lower the knife down until it stops rocking okay so that one's good I can actually snug these down looks like it's like kind of backwards you loosen it to make it tighter and those don't like to be like super ridiculously tight and the other thing I say to do is just bring these back down and slug them up and uh that's it now this cutter head has this actually spins this way this now has four knives in it instead of the stock two so Let's uh let's move on to the the side Cutters it's basically just two uh shaper spindles so the spindles are 25 millimeters so if you have any like shaper Cutters that might be a 25 millimeter bore you know you could you could run them on here so these are the indexed I guess molding knife cutter head things but if you want to do just like a S4s operation where you just want to do like a squaring up the edges thing you can get a spindle that's like a helical insert that just slides on there and you can bolt that in place so for these things so first off I guess these are the 10 and groove knives that come with the uh The Knife Set from wood Miser so as I was uh kind of doing my initial look through this machine familiarizing myself with it I noticed that the knives that they had received or they had running here already they had sheared off one of the groove Cutters so I would need to order new uh time Groove knives anyway so I ordered the uh I guess the more advanced set that has a whole bunch of different things in here that we can use to make all kinds of different things in the future but I figured while I was waiting I would actually order some actual flooring knives there's tongue Groove knives actually made for flooring because these ones here they just cut tongue and groove which is okay but it's not like the best for flooring so if you take a look at this picture here you can see you just have a groove on one side and a tongue on the other side and there's nothing really there's nothing else really going on the problem is is if you have like a little bit of schmuch or something down here on the floor or whatever and then you slide your next piece in there you're going to end up with The Gap up top and your top seam that actually matters will not close so last time when I made flooring what I did is I cut this shoulder back further and that would ensure that the top seam would bottom out and be tight every single time the other thing this doesn't have Which is less of a big deal is a nail slot so an actual flooring there's a little slot here along a tongue to give a spot for the nail head to actually go that way it's not a huge deal because the pneumatic nailers tend to set the nail heads low enough where it's not a big deal but if you had any kind of issues with that you wouldn't have to worry about using a nail set to go back and just make sure your male heads aren't protruding so these are the flooring knives the flooring tongue Groove Cutters that I ordered and it is uh I think this this profile here so we have a little mail slot in there and we also have a crap catch down in here so there's any kind of junk or anything laying on the floor as you slide these two pieces together just to give a place for some junk to go and not prevent this top seam from closing up completely so these things are all indexed they have these little studs in here so you can just simply pop in your knife it's all indexed exactly the same place with those index holes and then there's a wedge that you can slide in to lock the knife in place so that is sort of the easy part the more difficult and potentially annoying part about this is setting the height so it's not a huge deal if you're only doing something on one Edge that's not referential on the other Edge for instance but in this case since we're doing flooring these have to be set exactly right so that the tongue and grooves actually seat fully and the top ends up flush so that is actually done with all shims so that'd be a it'll be a fun little thing so they have different the larger ones and there are some really thin ones that I have as well so those set the final height for the spindle and uh that's going to be a pretty good amount of trial and errors so we'll have to get them set roughly in the right place and then we can go back and uh run some test pieces when we get there and we'll end up fine-tuning the height of uh either of these to get that tongue and grooved to actually line up nice and perfectly so now the fun part of getting these things set up right so I I want my groove to be a quarter inch off the bottom of the flooring so I have this straight edge here which is a quarter inch thick and that's where I want the uh the tongue here to actually start so that's actually pretty darn close right there so in theory those on there these on here let's drop on here [Music] this one here you can drop on here [Music] I'm actually doing it on this side is a little bit easier because I can actually put the uh the straight edge underneath the cutter and it is these are a little low so if I pull this out that will drop down oh it's starting to come up a little bit so let's try this which is I don't know 16th or something [Music] so I think that's going to be pretty darn good enough close it's a little bit high but as long as the other side matches the actual dimension on the bottom sides of the matter a whole lot I just want to be around a quarter inch let me throw the matching spacer on this side and that'll be our starting point for calibration foreign [Music] these are the nuts that lock the uh cutter heads in place and you have to shim up the rest of the spindle to get up to the thread height so let's do go there and now we can one of those reverse thread and this is reverse thread okay okay tighten that down okay right around there that's pretty close foreign look over here you can see this straight edge extends this fence and now here you can see how much material this fence here is set up to remove so this cutter head is going to remove whatever this distance is here since I already jointed The Edge I don't like to remove much of any material so I'm going to move this one uh to maybe like a 16th or something from the straight edge because it's practically all that you need to remove to actually square up the board it's already straight it's just not Square let's do that that's a good one we're getting closer okay last thing on the list should be the back Cutters I want to wait till now so I knew where this fence was going to be so I could lay out my flooring and make sure that these back Cutters are going to be somewhere in the flooring I think I'll probably have to just do one back cutter when we get to the uh the narrower stuff but at least for now for the we'll set up for the six inch wide stuff or whatever the wider stuff ends up being probably like five and three quarters or something so we'll set up these Cutters for that so the Cutters are exactly the same as the ones that would go into the uh the side spindles they just have these little Gibbs here which use the same index holes and then these things just drop into the uh the slot here in the cutter head so there is one set so I'll do two sets and we'll set the spacing here and then we'll do the same thing to the the opposite side of the cutter head install a pair of back Cutters over there and the exact same orientation and you can use these lines here in the cutter head to make sure that these are lined up from you know from 180 degrees from each other so put one here around one inch from The Edge and then we'll have one kind of here-ish so we have basically we're an inch from each Edge and then this is just some makeup space in the middle which is I don't know three quarters or something I don't really know these are not important like compared to everything else we're doing these are like the least important thing that will do because their actual exact placement is completely irrelevant because they're not interfacing with anything else they're just there to make those relief cuts so now the last thing I need well besides setting the actual with the of the cut is going to be the table height so that'll be the final thickness of the board uh when I installed this uh table here you can't really get to this bolt with this bolt here so my uh little indicator thing is off so to uh to get my at least my initial rough height I got a couple blocks up in there those are some magnetic shims and that'll allow me to get the cutter head too roughly where I need it to be and then I can make my first test passes and kind of fine tune things from there okay let's start getting this a little closer so this is going to move that mobile uh whatever spindle in which is going to be setting the final width of the piece so you have like two I guess two cranks here this is the final thickness of the piece this would be the final width of the piece now one thing to keep in mind with this is that you cannot run a piece through here more than one time so once the board goes through here that's it that board is done it cannot be you can't make an adjustment around the board again and see what happens you have to grab a new sample board because every time it goes through this bottom cutter is going to shave something off of it okay so after all of that let's uh let's power it up and see uh see how that goes so bottom cutter so the next major thing with the machine is going to be start throwing some test boards through it and getting those two Cutters at the right Heights so the tongue grooves match and the top ends up nice and flush before I do that I want to get the dust collection hooked up so I'm going to come off of my main trunk here right here is where it next down to six inch so I'm going to take this y out and put a 90 on here that that 90 right there I've got some other wise and fittings for my collection of nordfab stuff out in the barn I'm going to hobble together what I can with what I have here and I'll probably have to go and pick up a few small little things to finish up the uh little install this little temp temp dust collection trunk branch thingamabobber all right okay we got the dust collection all plumbed up and ready to go so that is uh taken care of and off the list so now we're gonna start running some test boards and getting those two side Cutters at the correct elevation for the tongue and groove so I'm gonna slam this thing through here we'll cut it in half and then we'll take a look and see uh how much the Cutters need to be shimmed to make that tongue Groove actually match up for those of you wondering as far as timing goes to get to this point I have 14 hours into this machine that's just setting up the machine calibrating it looking at it figuring out what the heck I'm looking at and uh all that that includes none of the time to process the wood to this point just for machine setup and Plumbing it into the dust collection thank you foreign [Music] [Music] questions okay for my second test I'm seeing that the tongue is just a little too high it's contacting the top of the groove just a little bit lift this one up so we need to pick this one up a little bit more so I just been kind of playing around with the shims here I have a seventh file and a sixth hour shim which seems to be the right height so if I raise that one up a little bit that seems like it's sliding in there a lot nicer so throw some shims in and run the third test piece foreign tests complete I think I'm ready to start running some flooring so I did make one quick change so you probably noticed that when the board hit this roller here it was getting kicked and uh there's a little bit of snipe happening so what was I think I don't know we'll see what I think what's happening is that these fences because they have these two adjustment points and there's enough slop in them they can do this kind of situation so I just realigned the fences here with a straight edge so it should be parallel but this was cocked kind of like this before so as I was hitting this roller here I was kicking the board over this way creating a little dip I think we'll see that theory works but otherwise if I have a little bit of snipe towards the front edge I don't it's not going to be a huge deal because these boards need to be trimmed still they have n checks so a lot of that should probably end up being removed anyway but all right let's see what happens I'm gonna run a few boards and uh we will see how the first few look and then once I'm happy with a few of these we can go ahead and just uh go I guess finally just go [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Applause] s through the machine per barrel [Music] so as I was running the boards I noticed that the rollers were in contact in the board anymore and what had happened and some of you warned me about this on Instagram is that this cutter the mobile one likes to move on it's on its own so what happened is it drifted out about a quarter of an inch so my finished flat surface went from five and seven eighths and drifted towards six and an eighth uh so I went ahead and I reset the cutter I re-ran all those boards with only that cutter spinning everything else was off except for power feed I uh I really really really crank down on the the lock here I guess it wasn't quite tight enough before but it's tight now and I also put a uh a witness mark on here so I can watch it to see if this thing backs out or moves as things are progressing after about 20 boards through I I feel pretty confident that I have figured out all the little little quirks and I have about two hours left here before I take my kids to swimming lessons so let's see if we can put a dent in the workbench and start uh clearing off some of the space [Applause] foreign [Applause] everyone there is the stack from yesterday that's how far I got in about three hours of actual finally just running it and not worrying about setting the machine up or something happening with it so that's uh three hours there so that's the same amount of time it took me to Edge joint every single board I got I don't know maybe 40 of the uh of the six inch pile done so I'm just gonna get right into it today and uh get going hopefully I can have the workbench cleared off before lunch or buy lunch or around lunch whatever lunch is happening regardless lunch will happen [Music] foreign [Applause] [Applause] foreign [Music] [Music] to announce that we are down to the last row super excited to be here finally Let's uh let's run through this last row and then we'll start making some uh narrow width planks [Applause] hi everyone I'm very excited to announce that uh the workbench is empty and we are done with the six inch wide flooring I'm going to reset kind of reorganize my thoughts a little bit start kind of digging through this and we'll uh we'll start making our second second run and then probably our third and maybe even a fourth run kind of after that holy crap finally okay those are all sword and prepped so these are going to be I'm gonna try and set these for four and an eighth wide and then these will be a five inch wide face or maybe a little bit under there four and seven eighths or something like that but these will be a little bit wider than uh well I guess it'll be an inch this is an inch smaller than this this is an inch narrower than that stuff so I'm gonna do now do the whole thing all over again we'll reset the uh mobile cutter thing and then uh start running some flooring again [Music] [Music] okay five inches done let's uh reset again and get to the four inch stuff [Music] [Music] [Music] oh foreign so here's the wood all stacked in the house I have things sort of organized a little bit so when I go to do the install I have my short pieces over there and some lower grade stuff on the bottom and this is all more like the premium best looking stuff so that should help with the install a little bit I had them stacked and stickered in here to help kind of mellow out their moisture content I was checking with the moisture meter as I was bringing things in and I'm seeing readings below four and up to about eight I want to get those eights to come down a little bit so these are going to sit in here and acclimate for a few weeks before I get into the install but I have to get the area prepped anyway so it all is going to kind of work out well as far as timing goes and fun fact I made these stickers out of the old stair treads for the staircase that we removed which used to be on the other side of that opening over there so kind of a fun little tie-in of sorts so big thank you to Matt and Andy for letting me the machine to make all this flooring that was super fun and very interesting to kind of experience and play with with if you missed the video that I did with Matt where he gave us a tour of his operation I'll leave you a link to that so you can definitely check that out now we have some actual flooring to get installed I'm looking forward to actually getting the stuff in here and really transform that space into something that is uh less less of a construction site and more of a home so thank you as always for watching I greatly appreciate for any questions or comments on making the flooring or anything back in the shop or anything here with the home renovation remodel thing my bobber please feel free to leave me a comment as always I'd be happy answer any questions you might have until next time happy working it's wood heck

2023-03-13 00:45

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