Carpentry and Woodworking - Workshop floor

This is also in the wood floors, laminate, and subflooring forum.

I am entertaining building a woodworking shop using pier and beam construction. I am trying to decide on what flooring to put over the 3/4" OSB.

Any suggestions?

Shoot yeah.....we're in hardwood country, use 'cabin grade' hardwood !

Or if you have a shaper, get a set of t&g bits and run it yourself.
You can buy cull lumber from local furniture plants here for 150/m....plenty good enough to make flooring out of.......

Or maybe you can find an old cotton mill being torn down and get some really cool old heart pine with about 100 years of sawdust/oil mix worked into it !

Thanks. I had not even thought of that. It would be a piece of cake to run off my own batch of flooring.

Well, while you're at it....give up some details on the shop...size, machines to be contained, etc......how can we have a vicarious life without the details ? :)

The shop will be 24 x 30. I am pondering putting a sliding door on it. One like Norm has on his shop. I have a Delta cabinet saw with the 52" unifence and a table that serves as an extension. It is 48" x 60". An old Penn state dust collector with one of the first Oneida cyclones built. I have a Biesemeyer overarm saw guard that mounts to the Delta. An off-brand drill press and many hand tools as well as a 3 hp Bosch plunge router with a raft of bits, a couple of other routers, drills, an 8 foot by 24" workbench, a couple of work tables for assembly and processing work. An Eaglespray HVLP spray rig. A Delta 12" planer.

I build furniture and cabinets, for the most part.

I plan to put up some postings on my web site of the construction and finishing so that others may follow along. It did dawn on me that I will need to make whatever flooring I intend to use, before I tear down the old shop. Otherwise there will be no place to work.

The router does an excellent job mounted in a shop-made router table. It is large enough to do almost anything with the right bit.

Have built this type of shop.
Flooring is important, but how you plan to joist the floor is more important.

Also, consider changing the exterior dimensions to 24 X 28 or 24 X 32. (If you plan on using exterior sheet goods it is easier to use a layout that breaks even at 4 foot.) Also how high (interior clearance) are you p[lanning on going? I would recommend a min. clearance on the inside of at least 9 foot.

This is a metal building, so the dimensions are set. I will have about 10 feet interior. That will be nice.

Thinking about floor stiffness made me wonder about joists on 12" centers rather than 16", instead of 2x flooring.

Yep...you'll like the 10'. My old shop had 8' and I was forever knocking a light out with a board or something.....so I made the new shop with 13' ceilings.......

May I make a recommendation on lights ? Rather than the typical 4 or 8' strip flouresents most use, consider the HID..high intensity discharge....fixture. I have 4 of them mounted flush with the sheet rock ceiling and it's like daylight in there ! These are the kind of lights you see in wharehouses or places like HomeDepot, except you can get a "low bay" reflector the is much wider and has a plastic diffuser on the bottom.

Thanks for the suggestion on the lighting. I don't like flourescents, because it takes so many and the bulbs are easy to break. I am going to put in some translucent panels as skylights in the end walls up high to help with lighting.

I had seen the HID in Lowe's and wondered about them. Now I know more about them.

You have to have some "depth" at ceiling level to use them, as they have a transformer box above the bulb socket....you can see that where they are used in wharehouse situations......I mounted that up in the attic area of my ceiling and made the reflector work out flush with the bottom of the ceiling line, so only the diffuser sticks down....that way no 'fine' dust collects on the top of the thing......just looks like a bowl mounted on the ceiling......

You can get several different bulbs....I use a 175 metal halide that gives off a blue/white light, but they also take the high pressure sodiums that you see in wharehouse use sometimes.

The transformer has multiple taps for about any voltage from 120v thru 480v, you just pick the one to match your input voltage.
On 120v, they only pull 4 amp, so they're fairly cheap to run... I've had mine in 6-7 years and have yet to change a bulb.

One downside is the 'warmup' time.....takes about 3-4 minutes to get up to "blind ya" bright....so I also ran a row of recessed incandesants lights down the center of the ceiling so I can have some "instant" light if I just want to walk thru the shop or find something w/o turning on the "big" lights.

I've got 4 in my ceiling that measures 24x60 on the flat part...the floor is 35x60, but I have a gambreled roof ( Dutch barn style), so the two sides slope at 45 from the 13' level down to the side walls. Also, all is sheetrock with gloss white paint, so that helps with lighting....

Another suggestion....run your ductwork for the dust collection under the floor if you can. I did and love it, and also electrical to my machines.....I can swing a board or fly a kite ( when so suggested by by wife : ) without hitting ANYTHING in the shop....and nothing to collect that fine dust that showers you when you do knock the pipe or whatever in most shops....

Chris,

I did not think about the skylights, but I use the overhead ceiling joists for wood storage. The 9' ceilings are low enough that I feel safe and they keep the lights down low so they project better. I use flourescent though, but I also use some standard lamps.

The sliding doors I think are better than the standard doors I made. They swing like standard doors (4 ft each) I spent a small mint for the hinges and still have to adjust them all of the time.

I don't think Chris was talking skylites....he was talking translucent panels in the end wall.

You have to be real careful about skylites in a building like this. If you use the fiberglass panel on a metal roof, it will rain water down on you from condensation in cool weather anywhere in this type climate....been there, done that, got the Tshirt.....any skylite you put in needs to be an insulated unit to prevent this.

Tn...Andy,

Do you have any place in mind that would have hardwood culls?

You are right, I am talking about translucent panels in the endwalls, not skylights in the roof.

There are a couple places here in Johnson City, Tn that have them....Empire furniture and Harris-Tarkett flooring.....but try any furniture plant down your way.