I keep working on the house as time allows. In September, I borrowed a friend's
old flooring drum sander. It needed new foam on the drum. I bought some off of
Ebay with its own adhesive, cut it to size, and adhered it after
scraping/sanding off all the remains of the old foam. It seemed to work fine. I
used 3/8” foam, but 1/2” would have been better (it ends up requiring the
sanding sheets to be have about 1/2” cut off their length – not a big deal).
When removing the drum in order to install a belt for the vacuum system, one
side of the aluminum frame that holds the drum broke off. I had to repair it
using a thin metal plate bolted to the side to hold the broken piece in place.
The repair worked fine.The flooring boards had some variation in height because the level of the tongues and groves was not consistent between all the boards. I’m not complaining – a friend milled the flooring for me, and I know how hard it can be to get everything consistent without an actual flooring mill machine. Because of the variations, I had to do some extra sanding to get the floor surface level.
I started with 24-grit sand paper, moved to 36-grit, 60-grit, 80-grit, and then 100-grit. The sander itself is not as strong and aggressive as I imagine a new machine would be. That was a good thing – less chance of creating divots and hollows in my floor. Doing the edge sanding was more of a job. I used a belt sander, mainly. This worked well.
In all, I spent about two weeks worth of work sanding the floors, but they are now done. Once we get things all cleaned up in the house, we’ll finish them with hemp seed oil. I don’t want to put a plastic finish on my natural wood floors. So, polyurethane is not an option. Besides, if you get a scratch in a traditional poly finish, you have a scratch in your finish that cannot be simply repaired. With an oiled finish, you can repair such things with a little sanding and more oil. An oil finish is not glossy/shiny, of course, but that’s not the look I desire. An oil finish is warm, soft, and durable. Hemp seed oil (and tung oil) is a drying oil – it will harden when it dries (it takes about two weeks to dry).
I’ll update after we get the floors oiled. In the meantime, here are few photos of the sanded floor.
2 comments:
It looks beautiful! I really like the idea of an oiled finish rather than stained.
Nice to hear that brute force isn't everything, and that you've been able to get some mileage out of a less powerful sander. The results look good!
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