Floorboard filler

correct, they dont know what they are talking about but i cant give you the answer you want

audi-evo is the best bet on this question, as with all things floor

 

sawdust pva glue stuffed in the gaps for tongue & grove, decorators caulk, If the gaps are wider them 3mm you will need to use wood strips with glue. If your staining & the gaps are small you can get filler from diy stores to match colour.

 

why do you need to fill gaps in the floor? are you painting it? please tell, coz you could go other ways, where "the norm" doesn`t apply
??

 

If the gaps are big you need wood strips banged in place with a mallet flush to the floor. Bang all nails down. Filler in gaps will fall through in time. It's a good thing to fill gaps, stops draughts.

 

I've no idea if this is viable, but I have a similar issue in my gaff. The living room floor is old pitch pine and has already been sanded and varnished by previous owner. There are, however, a fair few gaps (some 6/7mm) between the boards.

I was thinking that I could get a mill to run out some slim, wedge sectioned (ie thin triangular) strips so that I can smack them down between the boards. When it's tight I was planning to (carefully!) cut / plane them down to the floor surface, then touch stain them in to match the colour before giving the whole floor a couple more coats of varnish.

Sound viable, or am I talking out of my proverbial?

(For info, I don't think I could plane the wedges down without catching the boards either side...presumably if I haven't caught the boards I'll have a lip each side of the wedge...sound right?)

 

urham

have just finished a floor at great personal expense - aching joints still and that's two weeks later! - when I discovered an excellent company (FLOOR SANDER HIRE UK) in North London who could have done it at a reasonable cost for me. Anyway, their very useful website at

http://www.floorsanderhireuk.com/index.htm

gives the following suggestion:

"Square edge original pine floorboards can look better and will be draught free if you fill the gaps. You need our strong but flexible filler which has good side-bonding properties so as to grab strongly onto the board sides.
The 'wood' filler on sale in the sheds is not suitable: when machine sanded it comes up white and is brittle, as it is designed to fill holes not gaps.
Our multi resin filler has been developed over years, is flexible and gives an attractive dark shadow line between the boards, which suits any colour soft wood floor.
Scraper and Filler. Thin ply spot board to put filler on. Occasionally gaps are more than 5mm wide-you need to wedge these gaps with wood wedges. We sell wedge packs-phone for details."


I didn't use them but I saw what they did for a friend's floor - excellent. There's a very friendly, helpful and knowledgeable chap you can ring. I suspect their resin filler is the best you can get. (sawdust + pva glue just goes black in my experience of other floors earlier).

controlled magic
I had some thin triangular 'fillets' sawn up years ago - I seem to remember phoning over a dozen mills before I found someone who'd do it, and I seem to remember being charged £45 to do a room approx 25' x 12' - not cheap. Even with these I had to do a lot of extra shaping to get them to bed down sufficiently in the gaps. You might find it easier and cheaper to contact the company above for fillets. Also, I found it easiest to use a spokeshave rather than a hand planer to get the fillets flush - the notion of an electric planer scares the **** out of me on a beautifully sanded floor!

Hope this is of use.

 

The filler on that website is for 5mm max they do sell wedges, but I would have a look in the diy stores for tongue & groove or similar for the wedges. If you go with pva & sawdust use very little pvc & lots of sawdust. Soft woods can be sanded down with an electric sander.

 

Notromo - sorry for delay in replying, thanks very much for the pointers.

 

The only reliable way of filling gaps between floorboards are pine slivers - wooden strips which you insert into gap. You have to apply wood glue on both sides and tap it in with a hammer. We had it done a few years ago.