laying solid wood floors

[paulc]

Hello forum,

Still can't decide on a bandsaw or table saw, but have on your advice decided not to attempt to halve one inch walnut for floorboards. On that topic can anyone tell me if it is necessary to put down joists beneath floorbords, I've heard some people talking about just using a foam underlay. My original floor base is particle board of some kind (its a new timber frame build - apartment)

My problem is that I want to lay a strip of walnut flooring beside carpet and with boards an inch or so thick plus the joists beneath this will probably end up quite a bit higher than the carpet. Any suggestions

 

[George_N]

When you are laying flooring on top of an existing substrate, in your case chipboard, you can get away with much thinner boards. Lots of the cheaper laminate flooring is only about 6 mm thick and parquet flooring isn't all that thick either. Your thinner boards might be quite unstable though and want to cup and twist over time. That's why the better laminates, with a hard wood surface are built on a plywood backing, because of its stability. You might get away with narrow strips of your walnut but it sounds like a lot of work to rip down all your boards, thickness them and mill T&G edges. Not to mention wasteful of expensive walnut.