Making Flooring At Timbergreen Farm
We manufacture our annual salvage timber harvest into high-value flooring right here at home.
Be sure to read to the end of this page to see the best benefit from our work!
Once we kiln dry our lumber in our Solar Cycle Kilns, we store the wood in the humidity controlled sales room in the hayloft of our 100 year old dairy barn. The wood is kept at 6% Moisture Content so it is always ready to manufacture and install. This is Red Elm - one of our customer's favorites!
Our edger saw at the sawmill does double duty. Today we are ripping kiln dry lumber into flooring blanks.
The two circular saw blades in this machine are used to straighten boards and cut them to the desired widths for flooring. We usually make 2 1/2", 3 1/2", and 4 1/2" flooring as this minimizes the waste from lumber cut using the 4/4 scale on the Wood-Mizer sawmill.
This machine produces accurate blanks that make the rest of the process more efficient.
In our barn basement workshop, we pre-plane the good side of each board. This eliminates thick spots along the boards and takes off some of the sawtooth marks. We keep two blanks in the machine at all times, making this step go quickly. Passing the wood through the planer at a slight angle helps eliminate chatter from the ridges left by the bandsaw.
Shawn puts a Red Elm blank into the Logosol molding machine. This four head machine can make many different products, but flooring is our most profitable item.
This machine can produce very accurate finished products. I can see well enough to set the molder to within a half a hundredth of an inch - good enough!
All four sides, including the tongue and groove are planed with one pass.
It is truly rewarding to make finished wood products right here on our farm!
Photos by Susie Young
Next we will trim the flooring. Each customer chooses what species and how much character will be blended into their floor. Installing the flooring is the key to our success. Satisfied customers become our voluntary sales staff and their new floor is now another showroom for our products.
Since we have owned our molding machine, and installed the flooring ourselves, our lives have changed!
Several times each year, Shawn and I head to the tropics for SCUBA diving! We have traveled 40,000 miles in the past year - some business and lots of pleasure! Our most recent trip was to Little Cayman Island, south of Cuba.
Here is one of The Top diving sites in the world. From the shore, the bottom slopes gradually to an average of 40 feet deep. Incredible plant and animal life abounds in the clear, warm water. Turtles, Sharks, Moray Eels, Spotted Eagle Rays, huge Lobsters.... Directly below the boat right here, the reef drops off to 6,000 feet deep - the famous Bloody Bay Wall.
We are able to do this because we have learned to earn the full retail value of our wood!
Woodworking has some pretty nice benefits!
Birky