Thread: Where to get large pieces made out of glued floorboards cut to shape?

Hi Tegmark,

Are you asking where you can get floorboards made into a desk? If you are, then I can do it for you. Not so sure about the patterns on the top, but it's doable.

Let me know and I'll discuss it with you.

Regards,

Rob

Originally Posted by LGS

Hi Tegmark,

Are you asking where you can get floorboards made into a desk? If you are, then I can do it for you. Not so sure about the patterns on the top, but it's doable.

Let me know and I'll discuss it with you.

Regards,

Rob

Hi Rob.

My current setup is chipboard with veneer, & I would like to try the floorboard look with all those natural rough patterns.

pieces.jpg
I need these pieces made up on their own out of floorboards & nicely smooth as I have only basic tools. Then I can put these together my self & stain & varnish it. And then mount the top part on an older desk I have. I can give exact measurements of these pieces.

Thanks.

I have seen natural timber tongue and groove floorboards locally ranging in thickness from about 8mm to about 30mm, depending on intended application (overlay floorboards are thin, not quite sure exactly what the 30mm ones are for, basic floorboards to floor over joists used to be around 19mm).

I would be concerned about stability and flatness if the boards were glued into a panel using the tongue and grooves only without additional support as the boards tend to be much wider than their thickness. If you support them with substrate, the boards will try to expand and contract in width with changes in moisture content unless you achieve a 100% seal on the boards and substrate, otherwise the surface will cup as the boards will move but the substrate won't. Another option is to cla both sides of the substrate with similar boards, so movement on the top and bottom counteract, but you could end up with a thick heavy top. Either way you would have to be able to edge the layup to hide the substrate.

When unfinished boards are laid on joists, the whole floor is normally coarse sanded just to smooth the steps between adjacent boards, and then fine sanded if the floor is to be polished. Once you have glued up your boards to form a panel with or without a substrate, you will probably need to have it smoothed and sanded to get a great finish on it. The optimum machine to do this is probably a thickness sander, but as with any form of thicknesser, it needs a flat base on the panel to produce a flat top.

Depending on patern, style, size that you want on the top, it could be hand carved, possibly hand routed with templates, or a 3D router bit, or alternately carved with a CNC router, machine time may not be great but setup time to develop and computerise the pattern might be. CNC probably more relevant for a production run rather than a one off unless you have the skills and software to get the artwork together in a form that can be imported into a large scale CNC and massaged into the 3D code file.