KD Beech for Flooring?

Quarter sawn beech is spectacular!

Re: KD Beech for Flooring?

Barry Irby

Can be beautiful, but my understanding is it is prone to warp badly.

Re: KD Beech for Flooring?

Yonak

Once dried, I haven't noticed beech to be prone to much warping if properly stacked.

Re: KD Beech for Flooring?

Keith Newton

If I were the sawyer, I would saw the logs up 2.5” thick for flat dawn, then cut the thickness out of that, which would yield a lot of QS and rift.

Re: KD Beech for Flooring?

Bill Tindall, E.Tn.

What is the objective of turning the trees into floor? The trees were there before they were blown down and maybe lots of others. Why now for these trees for this use? Not a "dumb" question because the answer determines the advice.

Beech is a common tree in many woodland locations. Yet, beech is a worthless timber species except occasionally it is sold for RR ties and pulp wood. It has been used for industrial flooring in the past, but I have not see beech flooring for sale in my lifetime. What ever the motivation to use these trees for a floor needs to overcome the reason(s) nobody else uses beech for this application.

To specifically answer your question, the size of the room is irrelevant. Cracks will open and close to accommodate seasonal changes, if it is installed correctly.

Any experience with European beech is largely irrelevant to this application.

Re: KD Beech for Flooring?

David Weaver

No good. Too much movement and cracking due to changes in humidity can occur even after it's dried.

Maybe for a bolted down industrial floor.

Re: KD Beech for Flooring?

Yonak

Bill, ok, you asked the question. What's the answer ?

Why is beech wood not generally used for flooring ? I think that's the essence of the issue. As you say, it's what Don needs to weigh his desire to use it against.

Re: KD Beech for Flooring?

David Weaver

It's unstable before drying and will move a lot. It molds and splits easily when air drying and instability can last many years after it's dry. It's dull looking on its flatsawn face, and quartered is only stable in ideal wood that's also ideally saw. It has to be quartered or rift with ideal pith orientation on the mill. It still has mold, honeycombing, and cracking issues even when perfectly sawn. Most kiln schedules that I've seen along involve steaming.

Who will saw and dry it so that it's less expensive than mill run oak.

I build planes out of ideally sawn beech and really like it, but wouldn't like to deal with more commonly sawn lumber in any quantity.

What David said plus....

Bill Tindall, E.Tn.

The logs may be crap and not yield useful lumber. There is no guarantee the company doing the drying and milling will wind up with a quality product. I had some custom flooring milled and the resharpening of the T&G cutter left the tongue so tight it was miserable to lay. There may be even other reasons we haven't thought of.

In industrial flooring it is run as narrow strips which will lesson some of the problems David enumerates, but one is still left with a plane industrial looking floor.

But it may be that the desire to "save" this wood and have something at the cabin from the home place overcomes these disadvantages. Or the motivation could be saving money. Then I would answer differently. Hence my question goes first.

Thank You

Yonak

Thank you, David and Bill for your cogent answers. I had only a limited experience, going through about 300 bf. I had a very positive experience leaving me wishing I had more. The wood had a rich rose color with a fascinating grain, no unexpected movement or excessive waste. I'm glad to get good, broad information beyond my limited acquaintance.

If you really want to...

David Weaver

..a good point at the end.

If there is good lumber in the trees and it's sawn and dried without staining or nastiness (presuming that's undesirable), if you really want to use it as a matter of using something you've done start to finish, you can probably make it work.

With the cabin being unheated, and unairconditioned, it may get lots of practice moving.

One other thing that I noticed when I checked the working properties for beech (it's divine for wooden planes and we finish them naturally and there's no nailing of it) is that twice I've tried coloring my own planes to make them look older. I tried using stain, and I tried using tinted wax. Both looked *terrible*.

In reading the working properties, I saw a note of this for floors - that it takes pigment stains very unevenly and even color requires dyes. The page also said it splits easily when nailing, maybe that's the splitting bill was talking about - but it does split in a very dry cold snap, even several years old it can do that. Once a check opens up, it doesn't fully close again.

Wood has a property of shrink and spring back (or expansion. not sure of the official terminology). Beech is bad with this - maybe all woods are, but it would be across the width of the board. While there's volatile gas in it (Which is probably a decade or decades), it will shrink when it gets very dry, and the amount that it expands with subsequent moisture is less - meaning seasonal gaps that form will stay.

But the kicker with it is that its tangential movement is a pretty high figure - 30% greater than oak.

hand planes are made quartered, and what happens (even with extremely well sawn and dried wood) is the width of the plane gradually shrinks over the first several years, and then probably slowly thereafter. The effect of this is to find old planes split on the sides where they break out against the iron, or to find plane irons that can't be removed from planes because they're gripped beyond tight.

A flooring person would know what to do based on this. Does it mean install the boards tighter than normal (if that's possible?) assuming they'll shrink further? I don't know.

All that said, it wears really well. Especially a flatsawn face (the quartered face - not so much), so if you got it in place and it was stable and you didn't care about uneven color, the face of it would probably stay nice.

where did  you buy it

Bill Tindall, E.Tn.

Pink?....sounds like European beech. You can buy it by the ship load.

Re: KD Beech for Flooring?

Barry Irby

I live near Colonial Williamsburg and have been there many times and learned a few things. In many of the houses the flooring is wide planks. (We tend to think wide flooring is classy.) Some of it shrank so badly they installed strips about two inches wide between them to fill the gaps. In the Governors Palace there is flooring (Holly I believe) and the T&G strips are about 1 1/4" wide. In those days they thought narrow strips were classy, they were difficult to make, about the same trouble as the wide planks each, but making a floor that had very tiny cracks because the shrinkage was divided down so many times.

This is part of the reason modern flooring tends to be narrow. Across the room the total shrinkage is about the same, but with narrow boards the cracks tend to be more numerous but narrower and less objectionable.

The message is to make your floor boards narrow and dry them thoroughly.

As an aside, the only thing aside from planes I know of regularly made of beach was bentwood rockers. Apparently, if you rive the strips and steam them, you can bend then into fanciful shapes.

Re: where did you buy it

Yonak

Bill, I got it from an urban harvester in Atlanta. Here's a photo. The top is maple for comparison. The beech seems to have aged a bit to a sort of light brown over time but it still has rose hints. Really, it's still pretty close to the color it was when I worked it. I bought it when it was a couple of months cut and then I air dried it for another year or so.

I say go for it

Ellis Walentine

To me, the message here is that it's free wood, there's a mill that will convert it into flooring and it's going into a cabin. Seems like a cheapskate's dream come true. Nail it down solidly with your t-nailer and you've got a solid, durable floor and a bit of nostalgia.

Beech gets a bum rap because it is prone to deforming -- warp, twist, bow, differential shrinkage -- so it is not good for cabinetry or furniture where wider boards are going to move a lot. But it is great for laminated bench tops, and I see no reason why strip flooring wouldn't be fine once it's nailed down.

Ellis

follow up

Bill Tindall, E.Tn.

You know the provenance of this beech so it is unquestionably American Beech. The European product is invariably steamed to stabilize it. The result is a pink colored wood. I never used any so I don't know how long the pink lasts. Reds in wood tend to be not light stable.

If you want more beech (European) Atlanta Hardwoods can fix you up with any quantity (might be some minimum quantity). We bought from them occasionally off the wholesale yard NE of Atlanta. They have a retail operation somewhere in Atlanta but never been there to see what they stock.

I got a board of beech once in a pack of steamed walnut. It was predictably brown. I have had it in inventory for decades. I need to find something to do with it.

flooring width

Bill Tindall, E.Tn.

I was in some giant showroom of home stuff in Chicago. There was a flooring business that displayed there. They offered a wide, maybe as wide as 12", floor in most domestic hardwoods. (I pointed out a red oak board in the midst of their white oak floor display, but they dismissed my knowledge of oak). I asked and never got an answer of how they could keep it flat on the floor and more or less tight. The display floor was perfect. The price was staggering!

Strip floor was invented because the material cost is low. We had a flooring manufacturing plant nearby. They bought 2 Common red and white oak for the strip flooring product. The narrow strips mean more efficient use of the lumber. In #2 common the company could manufacture everything from clear to rustic narrow floor strips. The yield of clear would be nil in a wider product. There is a lot of waste in a 4" plank floor unless lumber can be specifically picked for it. (been there and done that) Plank flooring is cut from #1 Common, a substantially more expensive lumber.

Euro beech

David Weaver

..is practically our red oak over there.

When I was looking for beech, searches would bring up cost per cubic meter for logs FOB from eastern europe and they were something like 130 euro per cubic meter. wood harvested from western europe was double or a little more.

The cost for finished cubic meters (cut and dried) at retail in England is apparently about 700 pounds right now ($2.50 a board foot or so if my calculations are right, maybe there's a bump up for air space -I don't know).

Hearne told me that it was dumped over here at one point and ruined the domestic market for beech all at once - i hope I'm remembering what he said accurately, but the gist to me looking for beech was that it wouldn't be found next to oak, cherry, pine and maple at most lumber places.

Interesting on the floor boards...

David Weaver

... an about face since then as big lumber is harder to find and machine sizing is automatic in some places. A trip to IWF 12 years ago was interesting - train-like contraptions that take stock in one end and make shapes of things come out of the other at a high rate.

I wouldn't be surprised if they finish them now, too.

FIL made a workbench out of green 8/4 oak a few decades ago. He butted the boards together (I didn't know this) - he lives out near warren where getting wood sawn is no big deal if you have the wood and take it to and from the sawyer. Sawyers are amish or mennonite and reasonable. The boards were about 1*10 or 1x12 and bolted down in the centers. There's big gaps between each. I asked him if he made the bench like that to be able to sweep dirt off and he told me that he'd gotten the lumber sawn and didn't know they'd form. They'd require serious action if they were on a floor. They all cupped a little bit, too (all oriented the same way). Interesting work bench now, but he's not a woodworker, so functional enough.

The glass is more than half-full

Spax *LINK*

mark hennebury

Screw the floor down with Spax hardwood flooring screws.

I used them two years ago on my 4 1/4" wide cherry floor.

Spax are Made in Germany, Excellent product.

spax website

economics

Bill Tindall, E.Tn.

Seems like a cheapskate's dream come true.

I can't judge the validity of this conclusion from the data provided. The price of logs in the woods is a tiny fraction of the cost of an installed finished floor. We don't know what it will cost to haul, saw, dry and mill, then haul to job site vs buying equivalent flooring.

We don't know what the expectations are for the product. Clear defect free floor? Rustic? We don't even know what kind of floor. Narrow strip-practical. Plank-forget it. We don't know the grade of the logs vs the expectations of the product. Once on the ground beech spalts quickly. Beech in these parts yield low grade logs that saw low grade lumber. Northern beech can be better.

We don't know the quality of the product the mill promises or the likelihood they will deliver it. Dealing with small mills over the years has taught me to be skeptical of their capability.

Nail it down solidly with your t-nailer and you've got a solid, durable floor and a bit of nostalgia Agree with this part.

Beech deserves gets a bum rap because it is prone to deforming If the mill tries to mill flooring from warped and twisted lumber the result will be difficult to deal with.

Once properly KD it will not further warp or otherwise come off the floor. I have KD small quantities of beech and not had it go crazy. But it was well stacked.

The cracks may come and go seasonally but most flooring does that, more of less.

I will say again, whatever the benefits are of proceeding, and they are unlikely economic, the risk is substantial. The perceived benefit needs to justify this risk.

Rustic

Ellis Walentine

I guess if he wants a perfect job, the beech is a risky bet. My thought was that a cabin up the mountains says rustic to me and if he can land the beech, milled into strip planks, he can somehow maneuver it tight enough to nail down. I recall plenty of flooring jobs -- with more respectable woods -- that I had to use cold chisels to lever the boards into place. I was just happy to have affordable materials that looked great when it was all over.

Ellis

follow-up from looking up prices

David Weaver

I found a small database of price information, though it don't understand all of it.

French beech by the cubic meter, sawn "F-B1" grade, which I guess means the price is for mixed grade, is 320 euros. If my math is correct, that should be just above or slightly below 400 board feet (depending on how air space is accounted for).

log wood is just over a third of that.

I'm sure their oak isn't the same thing as ours (just like english brown oak is nicer than our red), as the oak price is about 3-3 1/2 times that.

Red oak in the US sawn at the same time was about $1.20 a board foot priced per thousand (#1 and #2 grade) and hard maple was about $1.40 to $1.50.

Sawn pine here is about 1/3rd to 1/2 the price of oak (i was incorrect, our sawn oak is also more expensive than beech in france), and in europe, it's only very slightly less expensive than beech.

That may explain why there's so much beech ply in ikea furniture.