If you’re interested in how we manufacture our reclaimed pitch pine flooring, take a look at the various processing stages below!
Choose Timbers
The first part of the pitch pine flooring journey is selecting the right timbers to work with. They need to be solid and rot-free with minimal twist. All the beams we use are reclaimed from old mills and factories so have plenty of character, which carries through into the finished pitch pine floorboards.
Remove Metal Objects
Removal of foreign objects is a very important part of the reclaimed flooring process. Screws, nails, wire and bolts are the most common objects we have to remove and some are buried deep within the beams so a metal detector is a must! The resulting nail holes and nail bleeds add a lot of interest and aging to the final pitch pine flooring.
Resaw into Planks
When the timber is clean of metal, it is ready to be resawn into thin planks, slightly oversized to the finished floorboard dimensions. This is where the grain and figuring of the wood is exposed for the first time in hundreds of years and we start to see what the finished pitch pine floorboards will look like. It’s also when the pitch pine releases its distinctive scent!
Plane and Profile Boards
The planks are now fed into the 4-sided planer moulder. If we’re making tongue and groove pitch pine flooring, the machine planes the top and bottom of the boards square, and adds a tongue down one edge and a groove down the other. For straight edge pitch pine flooring, the machine planes all four sides square. Rejects are discarded at this point if they don’t make the grade.
Prepare Delivery
The finished flooring is stacked up onto racking ready for collection or delivery!
Process the Sawdust!
As you can imagine, all this processing produces a lot of sawdust. We have two large dust extractor units which remove all the sawdust and chips from the machines during processing. We then feed the sawdust and chips into a briquette press so that our waste is turned into a usable fuel, which we either sell or burn to heat our workshop!