Shop Floor

[rjhidaho]

I am about ready to convert a back room of my home into a permanent shop location.  The room used to be a porch, then a screen-in porch, and eventually an additional room attached to back of the house.

My issue:  I want to install an appropriate flooring material for the shop that will be easy to maintain, can withstand the weight of machine tools on mobile bases.  The current sub floor is standard tongue and groove plywood.

I am considering commercial vinyl tile (like in schools and malls), unfinished tongue and groove flooring, and even a laminate flooring. It doesn't have to be beautiful, but it is part of the house so it should be presentable.

I would appreciate any opinions/recommendations/experiences.

thanks

rjh

 

[Brice Burrell]

What do you have in the rest of the house? A finished hardwood woul be a great surface.

 

[nickao]

Finished hardwood is great and would be my first choice.

I survived on the T&G ply floor for years. I use a durable exterior porch flooring paint rolled onto the plywood. It lasted for years(house fire destroyed it before it wore out) and a quick sweep and mop and it looked great. I used beige in one area, gray in another. If you really mess up the floor, just roll out a little more flooring paint. No need to go epoxy, I found the exterior porch paint was durable enough.

Using the porch paint is cheap, fast, works and you can still put down hardwood or just about any floor over it later. And it looks better than you would think.

Nickao

 

[mastercabman]

I am about ready to convert a back room of my home into a permanent shop location.  The room used to be a porch, then a screen-in porch, and eventually an additional room attached to back of the house.

My issue:  I want to install an appropriate flooring material for the shop that will be easy to maintain, can withstand the weight of machine tools on mobile bases.  The current sub floor is standard tongue and groove plywood.

I am considering commercial vinyl tile (like in schools and malls), unfinished tongue and groove flooring, and even a laminate flooring. It doesn't have to be beautiful, but it is part of the house so it should be presentable.

I would appreciate any opinions/recommendations/experiences.

thanks

rjh

be careful with vinyl tiles,they can be very slippery when there's saw dust!
i would leave it plywood and paint it like nickao posted.

 

[Eli]

I found that the engineered solid wood T&G floor got pretty slippery too. I'd vote ply. The porch paint sounds like the go.

 

[Frank Pellow]

I recommend what I have in my shop; that is G1S fir plywood with three coats of oil-based floor paint.  It looks good, is easy on the feet, handles heavy roll-around tools well, easy on dropped tools, and is easy to repair should you gouge it. 

Only one thing I would add and that is: the next time I apint it, I am going to add a bit of grit to the paint.

 

[Mettes]

A little late, but none the less if you haven't decided...

an endgrain wooden floor, it's an industrial grade floor.

benefits:

it's hard, much harder then a normal wooden floor, but it doesn't damage your chisels, or anything else sharp, you might drop and it can withstand very heavy weights.
You can make it from scrap left overs (short pieces which you run true the planner), so it's cheap, it will take some time, but maybe it's worth it.

Personally I think it looks very nice, this picture was taken in a museum in Berlin (Museum of technology and technical), they have it all over the place.

cheers, Hans

 

[semenza]

Hi,

  That end grain floor is nice.  I would think that it needs to be very well sealed. Do you know if it has problems with wood movement due to the orientation?

Seth

 

[John Langevin]

Many of the factories(Chandler-Evans, Colt's, Pratt & Whitney, and Smith & Wesson) I have worked at in New England all had similar end grain block flooring. It was typically about 3" thick Oak and covered with a hard black finish (Creosote?) that they would reapply every few years during Summer shutdown. The stuff was fairly easy on your feet, didn't damage cutting tools if dropped and wore like iron.

When they were building our new Quality Engineering offices at Smith & Wesson in the central "Connecting Building" (circa 1910 I think) they removed some of the floor and I was amazed at how little wear there was after having had thousands of heavily loded industrial carts (not to mention foot traffic) travel over them those many years.

A lot of labor to prepare and install but I can't think of a more suitable or longer lasting shop floor for really heavy duty use.