Steller Flooring: How We Craft Hardwood Floors

hi guys so Lee is out of the shop today which gives us the unique opportunity to still Evan and to find out how each step of Stellar's process in the woodshop is adding quality to your stellar floor [Music] I found heaven out here next to this pile of the rough lumber that's coming into our shop and so what I want him to do is to tell us what type of lumber we need to get from here so in order to make really good floors we have to start with a very high quality grade of lumber and that means that these boards are wide and they don't have very many defects or grain irregularities in them to start with okay so since wood is a natural material things like knots from branches bug damage and even damaged from the Soaring process can affect the quality of the flooring material that comes out of it okay so we're selecting for something that's really high quality but what happens if we get a Bourdon that doesn't meet your standards if the problem is local it's not spread over the whole board or it's not very impactful to the board we can often remove that by cutting it out however if we do get a board that just isn't gonna work well for floors we can repack that and sell it to another hardwood flooring manufacturer who can make a good product out of it great I'm really okay so so let's go over to the chop saw and we'll talk about starting to process this board [Music] so we're at step two of our process here and this is the chop saw so Evan what are we doing in this step so the chop saw what we're doing is we're starting to defect the lumber meaning getting rid of defects and we are starting to establish the final length of that board okay so what are we talking about usually we're talking about four foot that's the link we like to target but then if we pick up any defects through the process we'll cut that board down to 342 foot okay so four feet doesn't seem like a fall that long to me why are we choosing that way so the reason we do four-foot lumber is from my drawing background I can tell you that almost all eight-foot lumber has a bow in it so either we pass that bow on to the customer or we take care of it for them and give them a nice flat flooring plan to work with I love that we are removing bury build variability with pet stuff okay so from here where do we go next we'll go over to the jointer all right so at this point we have made sure that there are no knots in this board and we cut it so that we can get it flat this one is definitely flat so Evan what's the next step so the next step is to establish that black face and that's what a joint is for okay so this is the step where we get that entirely flat surface and is this something that is done everywhere in the industry no unfortunately most flooring manufacturers are focused on production so what they'll do is they'll feed Boone wood through a planer which has hold downs that press the board flat and then machine both surfaces however when the hold downs let go the warp comes right back okay so let's same warp that we were talking about in the previous step it's just there through the entire process yep it will actually end up in that final flooring as well okay so to do this do we create any more waste than someone else in the industry no since rough sawn lumber is cut to about an inch thick what happens is to make a three-quarter inch flooring plank we actually have to remove the same amount of wood as any other for manufacturing great I'm glad to hear that okay so now it's truly flat then the next step that seems like should be to cut our grooves yep right now we have a great foundation piece and we can get moving on turning it into a piece of flooring okay [Music] okay so now we have a board that is flat free of defects and we're finally ready to make our stellar group so Evan how do we do that so what we've done is we have taken a piece of standard shop equipment and heavily modified it to cut our inward angle group now this groove may look really simple but it's actually so unique in the wood products industry that we were able to cusp to patent this custom group that's awesome so do you have a question does it cut both groups at once no unfortunately at this point it only cuts one groove at a time so it's a two pass process however between those two grooves were able to hold within three thousandths of an inch I've also noticed that you guys seem to be setting your eyes on these boards at a lot of points during your process is that the case yes it is our flooring being a new product being something we want to make way in the industry for in revolutionize the way people are doing hardwood floors we want to make sure that every piece is perfect and then it gets to the customer in a condition if we can perfect so it sounds like this board then is through with manufacturing and ready to go on to the finishing yep

Channel: Steller Floors

Views: 6,053

Rating: 4.8762889 out of 5

Keywords: hardwood floors, hardwood, steller innovations, flooring, innovation, design, quality, floating floors, manufacturing, how to

Id: 0OXDDO-OZ5o

Length: 5min 56sec (356 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 12 2019