doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Restocking Slab/Rift or Quartersawn?

When my dad was a young boy (born 1910) he lived in a house with a Puncheon floor. How many here even know what that is?? When I was in my teens he carried me to where it was still standing, but we weren't able to go inside, only saw it from the outside. Some years back my wife & I drove by the place again but the house was then gone. While living there my Grandmother threw some dishwater outside & threw off her wedding band. The entire family searched for it diligently but were unable to find it. A short while later they moved to the Metropolis of "Bell Buckle" TN. Some 20 years after the loss a gentleman knocked on the door of their home in Bell Buckle. He had the ring in his hand. His family had moved in to the house & had been planting some flowers & unearthed it. Her initials "ELF" were engraved inside. He had tracked her down by these & returned it. So far as I know she wore it from then until the day of her death, many years later.
My Grandmother's maiden name was Kelly & she married a Fulks. When she married her initials thus changed from "ELK" to ELF".

Puncheon floor was a lot of work back when time was most of what they had. To take a hand or foot adze to level planks left a floor which was slightly like a washboard. As a kid I bet it was not fun crawling around either. No wonder those men were tough as nails when you grew up in a rough house it made you tougher. On the farm I grew up on we had several floors like that in small cabins which we were told had housed tenant farmer and before that most likely a small slave family.

The floor joists under me, as I type this on an Apple computer, in a room illuminated by LED lighting, are mortised and tenoned, and held with wooden pegs about 1 1/2" diameter. They are all heart cut yellow pine. Termites have tried to bore into them at times, but they get about 1/4" deep and give up. Fat lightered pine doesn't give in to termites.

I replaced all the windows years ago with double paned insulated ones. The originals had those wavy glass panes that look like they got too hot and "ran". Even though I liked the looks of the old ones, I'll admit the new ones are a lot better! Oh, the compromises we make for the comfort of our wives! I can well remember that, before they were replaced, on a cold and windy night a NW wind would make the curtains on those windows wave about inside the house like a tortured wraith. "Drafty" is entirely too mild a term for it.

SRH

Heart pine is nearly bullet proof. Very hard, better than cyprus for rot resistance, I made gun rests from it 28 years ago, they sit in the sun and rain and are still in great shape. The only problem I have is that it splits very easy.

bill

It does split easily, bill. But if you ever need to nail a lot of it use "square" "cut" nails. They punch a rectangular hole as they're driven through the board instead of acting like a wedge as a conventional nail does. In my dining room the flooring, the walls up to the chair rail, the chair rail itself and the 7- piece crown molding were all nailed with cut nails. Very few splits, and those boards were 70-80 yr. old re-planed lumber salvaged from tenant houses on this place. Fat as a pig.

SRH

Stan I know exactly what you mean about the old windows. The only one I replaced in my Granfathers house had the wavy glass. My wife had a fit cause she liked it but we had no choice because time had taken its toll.

My only regret is that I didn't replace the rest of them because of the wind and curtian situation you describe.

It's not related, but the comments remind me of getting into the walls of a couple of plain houses for small projects. They were framed in old growth Redwood, and quite a ways away from where they were logged. It's probably like good SYP, they don't make 'em like they used to. Geeze Stan, seven piece crown molding and cut nails, that was not easy.

The carpenter showed out on that, craigd. I'll try to get a pic of it tomorrow. I love it. It has what he called "dental work". He was just a country carpenter, but he had vision.

Old SYP lumber is highly sought after, even now. Some of the real old country churches have pews made of very wide SYP boards. Those old church pews are very valuable, but alas, there are almost none left.

One interesting fact is that the masts on many of the old sailing ships were made of SYP. Whole trees were turned into huge, tall main masts.

https://books.google.com/books?id=oOwOAA...sts&f=false

SRH

Only a guess, but you may be thinking 'dentil', the repeating block strip that might be worked into the crown molding somewhere. In a completely silly side story, a while back I made a short span of decorative natural finish wood fencing. Nothing store bought, the whole thing was milled up from rough stock with some dentil molding that I made up. A couple of years later, on a whim, my wife had it painted. I could've slapped that thing together for a fraction of the time and money if I only knew.

Anyway, if it's the dentil molding that I'm thinking about, there's a bunch of marginally supported end grain. You started with some good stock, seeing how you folks were commenting about splitting, for your finish carpenter to tackle the project. The fellow might have had some vision, but he sounds like a good ole boy that took pride in himself and his work. Sure, I'd like to see how it turned out if a picture works out. Take care.

I have several small areas old growth SYP trees on my land. Two trees were prime candidates to be the mast for the Pride of Baltimore II. A topsail schooner built in the 1980's to replace the first ship which sank in 1986. The criteria for the mast was clear of limbs for the first 60' and needed to square about 24-32 inches at that point. Big tree. It was a long time ago and my best trees were marginal they said. I think the fact I was not going to give them to them and cutting them would best be done with a helicopter for removal had a lot to do with their being passed over. You can not cut a few trees, in the middle of the woods and drag them out when they are the biggest part of 100 plus feet. Same woods produced pilings for the 1939 Worlds Fair. Those were cut 60-75' long and trucked up at night time by my grandfather. I guess those were the little bothers of these bigger, older monsters.

Funny how attached I have become to those old trees. From a money standpoint cutting them would be easy but there are so few of them left anymore. Even the bark looks different. Big blocks like your hand, worn smooth with time, almost like the tree is shingled in bark. I just let them keep growing and will try to manage the trees around them to protect them. But I know all trees die in the end. These I can enjoy and let live for now but I worry about lightening, hurricanes and the damn borer getting into them.