Shopsmith Forums

TomHoffman wrote:

BuckeyeDennis wrote:This discussion motivated me to do a little research. For my secret-room project, I'm paneling the walls in cherry, and doing the floors in red oak. Most of the boards will be about 6" wide, and I plan to tongue-and-groove them all. My T&G router bit set will cut both the tongues and grooves a maximum of 7/16" deep, but I didn't know how deep I actually needed to cut them, or how much spacing to leave between boards when installing.

It turns out that Nick Engler has a nice tutorial on this, on his Workshop Companion site.

Your bit set should come with roller guide bearing on the top, this will allow you to automatically cut to the correct depth as set by the guide bearing so the bit will either leave a slight gap or not, most likely there will be a small gap that will then look uniform and give the boards a tiny bit of room to move. Harbor Freight has a good Floor Nailer for slightly more than it cost to rent. I had one until I lent it to a friend and now he moved to Ohio. Oh'well...

Hey, I'm in Ohio -- maybe I can borrow that nailer from your friend!

Actually, I plan to countersink, screw, and plug the floor boards with walnut plugs, just because I like that look. And I'm planning to face-nail the cherry paneling with square-cut nails, for an old-timey look.

This is the Freud T&G bit set that I bought for my paneling project. I measured the max depth of cut at 7/16" for both the tongue and the groove, which is what you get if you guide on the bearings. But I'll be running the lumber against the fence of a router table, and so I can cut to whatever depth I want.
My cherry lumber is currently rough, and there's way too much of it to think about flattening with a planer sled. So I'd have to buy an 8" jointer to be able to flatten all of it myself. I finally found a mill fairly close by that will flatten, thickness, and straight-line edge it all for me at a pretty reasonable price.

Unfortunately, while loading the cherry on my trailer, I discovered an active powder-post beetle infestation. So I bought the recommended wood treatment to stop that once and for all. But now I'm having to wait for above-freezing weather so I can treat it.

But enough about my project -- this thread is supposed to be about yours!

We are done sanding now and putting on the wood conditioner, then will stain, more pics this evening.

Here are some more pictures. Floor was edge sanded this morning using my Porter Cable Random Orbit Sander (ROS) with 80 grit paper. Then the rest was double sanded using a rented commercial 4 disc ROS two times with 60 grit and two times using 80 grit. Then swept vacuumed and coated with MinWax Wood Conditioner. Last but not least was a coat of MinWax Oil Stain Early American #230. Now I am going to give it till 10PM tonight to dry and then I will start the first of 3 coats of MinWax Poly Floor Finisher Semi Gloss.

That REALLY looks nice!!!

2nd Coat of Poly just went down..