How tools Turn back the time.

In modern woodworking, there's a tool for everything. In flooring today we are still doing the same jobs we were 100 years ago, the tools in our hands are just making it easier

If you've spent the big bucks on the latest machines you're getting the best, you are getting accuracy, precision, and uniformity. From a business perspective it’s saving you time. It reduces human error. It makes the whole process more cost-efficient. Are all these things really what we want? What are we losing by speeding up the process?

Time for a case study, I'm working on a rustic 16th-century cottage in the countryside. Beautiful wooden beams, washed walls and crooked doors, what's the vision for the floor? I think most people would agree that it needs to reflect its surroundings. It needs to undulate and roll, not be flat as a pancake. It needs gaps and cracks between the boards which open and close based on the seasons. Its colour needs to vary to show that every board is individual and has aged differently. So how do you achieve this character in a newly installed reclaimed floor?

The goal when preparing, and installing an old floor is to make it feel like it's been there for decades. The wood itself has been a floor for over a hundred years before I touch it, and it will be a floor for a hundred years after I'm finished. I’m a firm believer in authenticity when reconditioning old boards, the wood we select already has a rich history, so our process should reflect this.

Our work begins with denailing. Anyone in the reclaimed wood industry will shiver at the term remembering long hard days with hammer and punch in hand, sweating over granite-hard planks of oak, full of disintegrating cast-iron nails. We at Drummonds have spent the past 30 years picking up the same tools and using the same techniques. My fresh hands joined the efforts ten years ago, and after a few years of bruised knuckles I endeavored to find a better way. Spoilers, I didn't. I tried pneumatic guns, specialist drill bits and swanky tools. The majority just didn't work, and the ones that did leave the boards with scars that didn't look natural at all. In the end I concluded that even though the process is long, it's just one of those jobs that's better to do by hand. A statement that in my opinion resonates with reclaimed flooring as a whole.

If I pop to my local machine shop and buy a brand new laser-guided computor-adjusted ripsaw that cuts millimeter perfect it’s going to make cutting boards to width easy. What I actually do is work on a traditional table saw measuring every board as I cut, accounting for a slight margin of error. Time-consuming and less precise.

The goal I set myself is to make floors containing genuine character that the reclaimed boards have collected over time, combined with the authentic signs of traditional machinery. All while maintaining a level of accuracy so our installers don’t pull their hair out.

If you would like to know more about the machines and techniques we use, give us a call!