Thread: Milling reclaimed/recycled T&G floorboards for box making

I went down this path a few years ago, but found a few things that stopped me from continuing:

-- Nails. Bang. There goes a tooth on the tablesaw/bandsaw and $90
-- Coatings. They are really tough on modern boards. They are a bugger to remove and really grind the HHS/carbide teeth
-- With very early ones, there is a considerable quantity of dirt in them. This kills carbide cutters. Getting them clean was a real problem.
-- People are idiots. I'd say 80% of ads on Gumtree from people selling "guaranteed solid timber floor boards" pulled up from renovations are selling laminates and composites. I spent too much time going out to find, Yet Another Laminate....

I found its cheaper just to find good stashes of timber from old garages and use that.

For de-nailing, FenceFurniture put me onto an airgun style of denailer. They are lethal. Let me find the link. (edit: here it is, its the Nail Kicker https://nailkicker.com/ )

My general hints, that sort of worked for me:

-- You can generally buy left over boxes from flooring companies quite cheaply. Ive still 5 here, which is 5sq.m which cost me $30 total.
-- They can hardly sell the last couple of boxes, if ever, so dont let them pretend they are doing you a favour by offering a 10% discount.... $5 a box (sq.m generally) or its the highway!
-- Removal of the rear grooves is problematic. On a 19mm board, they can easily be 9mm deep. It is fastest to remove them simply by running them through the bandsaw... A carbide blade like a Lenox Woodmaster does the trick.
-- When you scalp off the urethane topcoat, you loose another 3mm.... so your boards are getting pretty skinny by now
-- Then you need to sand them. A second hand thickness sander can be obtained with a little patience on Gumtree for $300 (generally).


If you make blanket chests, there is no need to process them at all. Leave all the grooves in and the urethane (coating) in place. Two Sq.M of boards makes fabulous blanket chests.

Yeah I got what seems to be offcuts of the type that's flat on both faces.

Some just needs some minor work to joint them,

20171006_211525[1].jpg

When I work with floor board offcuts I just leave the back grooves and T&G on the boards (this helps to joint them together) and only remove any T&G's and grooves that show.
In some cases like the insides of cupboards or lined boxes the grooves don't matter.

For example, the undertop components of this desk incorporated many jarrah floor board offcuts

Desk2.jpg