Curvy wood floors use CAD/CAM to minimize wastage

Bolefloor makes hardwood floors that eschew the wastefulness of straight lines. Instead, they use computerized analysis to calculate puzzle-fit lengths that follow the curves and irregularities of the uncut logs, producing an organic, irregular mosaic that I find much preferable to the straight lines of traditional wood floors.

Bolefloor technology combines wood scanning systems, tailor-made CAD/CAM developments and innovative optimization algorithms for placement software developed by a Finnish engineering automation company and three software companies in cooperation with the Institute of Cybernetics at Tallinn University of Technology.
Bolefloor scanners' natural-edge visual identification technology evaluates "imperfections" such as knots and sapwood near the edges or ends so that floors are both beautiful and durable.

Bolefloor (Thanks, Error27, via Submitterator)

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

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Michael Smith

I have a hard enough time building floors out of timber which is supposed to the straight. If you had a lot of material in odd shapes you might be able to fit a small amount of it together to make a floor but I reckon you would waste more material that way than by cutting it straight to start with.
dargaud

As someone who laid down a wood floor last year, I must say this is stunning. No info on prices though… One observation: the width of the room must be taken into account when considering the board matches, so they must be made to order or in predetermined sets of width (with a little extra cut on assembly).
Anonymous

yeah, love the uniqueness of these floors, but the lack of straight lines would drive my wife crazy :)
Anonymous

Looks beautiful – but speaking as someone who lives in a 120 year old building and has just had to repair most of my floorboards these will be a pain to repair in the future!
IamInnocent

In short: CAM machines are more energy wasteful than band saws or circular saws; tree very rarely match this way so, in reality, more wood has to be chopped off to get the illusion; packaging will be inefficient and so more wasteful; time involved into laying it down will triple which, obviously, is less efficient hence wasteful; repairs will be next to impossible, in practice, due to cost among other things.

It is beautiful, restful for the eye, very expensive and likely energy-vore. I love this authentic product of the Green Bourgeois mindset of the fist part of the 21st century period.
- Anonymous
  
  My initial thought too.
  
  But I would love to see more of the process to understand fully how it is realised.
- Niklas
  
  You are making tonnes of guesses about this that does not add up upon scrutiny and you do not even try to add data to your faulty conclusions.
  
  1. A industrial band saw is on the scale of 5kW to over 15kW. An industrial CAM is seldom over 1.5kW.
  
  2. Less wood need to be chopped off using this method, resulting in less spillage.
  
  3. Packaging will be relatively a non-issue since these are made to order. The carpenter will come and pick up the package of boards just as he would come and pick up the package of boards if the boards were straight. The mill also spends less energy shuffling around waste and spillage because there is less waste and spillage.
  
  4. Time for manual labor will have zero net effect on the environment. Why do you even bring up this point?
  
  5. Just put in an order for a specific form and the CAM will calculate one from the next batch of boards, so in effect the waste will be less than with straight boards. Also, real wood floors can hold just fine for centuries with normal wear.
  
  6. I love the smell of troll in the morning.
  - bcsizemo
    
    And yet you still glaze over some of the more intricate details of said troll…
    
    1. How fast is that industrial 15kw band saw vs. that CAM machine?
    If you are talking 5x faster than it’s a moot point. (Also considering the mechanics of both, that band saw would have a longer blade life and lower over all maintenance.)
    
    2. Repair. Things built to a standard are vastly easier to repair than something custom to it’s environment. Sure it might not happen very much, but it would take a good carpenter to cut and match up a new piece to fit the old one.
    
    I still wonder how much wood this would really save. I would think most lumber/saw mills have a minimum log size and would have very little curvy wood. Unless this company is going from logs to finished product I doubt there is substantial wood savings.
    
    That and I’d also be worried about bowing unless the environment was very stable. The wider the wood the more expansion, so you’d end up with varying pressures and expansion as the humidity changed. (Probably not an issue in a modern home, but I know in my house the humidity goes from 30-75% RH from winter to summer, built 1910)
    - SamSam
      
      Unless this company is going from logs to finished product I doubt there is substantial wood savings.
      
      I think that’s the entire point of this thing, isn’t it? They’re going from logs which by nature start out not being even or straight. Modern techniques then cut everything down to a uniform, smaller size, wasting plenty of wood.
      - jasonq
        
        Well, yes and no. Most lumber and flooring manufacturers tend to want logs that are straight, which can be had quite easily.
        
        What this does is allow the use of logs that aren’t quite straight, and it does eliminate some of the waste that comes from trimming the outer bits.
        
        For what it’s worth: I am given to understand many lumber mills use the waste wood (bark, chips, shavings) in power co-generation plants.
        
        That all said, this is neat stuff.
    - Anonymous
      
      Bowing is a non-issue if the installer knows what he/she is doing. When nailing down wood flooring, you leave room against the walls where molding will be placed so there’s room for the wood to expand and contract without pushing against the walls or shrinking enough to expose the rough edges.
      
      As for repairing the floor, it would be exactly the same as any hardwood floor. You sand and refinish it as a whole floor. This isn’t necessary for many years provided you aren’t herding animals through the house. The only tricky repair would be replacing a board do to a deep scar if you failed at moving a piece of furniture around.
      
      Personally, I’d do a pencil rubbing to get the shape of the individual board before sawing and prying it out, so I could properly shape the new board. Matching the finish would be the hardest part on a custom floor like this.
    - Niklas
      
      2. Repair. Things built to a standard are vastly easier to repair than something custom to it’s environment. Sure it might not happen very much, but it would take a good carpenter to cut and match up a new piece to fit the old one.
      
      Then do like most sane folk do and avoid bad carpenters in favor of good carpenters.
      
      Unless this company is going from logs to finished product I doubt there is substantial wood savings.
      
      Which is exactly the point of the matter.
      - Anonymous
        
        I have employed approximately fifteen carpenters in the last eight years in business. About half of these I would call good. Out of that number there is probably only one or maybe two that could make a duplicate of a damaged piece and install it. Very few people would have access to a carpenter skilled enough to replace this. I’m guessing that it would take them 2-4 hours to fabricate the replacement and install vs. 15 minutes to one hour for a stock floor board. It also involves making a special trip to a lumberyard that stocks raw lumber and a woodshop with the appropriate tools. How is this green again?
  - princessalex
    
    “3. Packaging will be relatively a non-issue since these are made to order. The carpenter will come and pick up the package of boards just as he would come and pick up the package of boards if the boards were straight. The mill also spends less energy shuffling around waste and spillage because there is less waste and spillage.”
    
    Only if you already live in the Netherlands, where the manufacturer is. Anyplace else, and packaging’s going to be involoved. Also, the mill isn’t necessarily near where everyone’s going to be building their houses. The wood still needs to be transported. Even if packaging isn’t an issue, I’m betting they’ll get fewer square feet or meters of this wood on a truck than standard straight-cut.
- Anonymous
  
  You are dead on. The fantasy that this is “green” is ludicrous. The labor intensive cutting, organization, shipping and installation guarantee that. My wood floors have been repaired sixteen times in the last seventy years, with this method that would be nigh impossible. Only those not seriously involved with construction could believe this to be environmentally responsive. It is a beautiful art project, nothing more.
Anonymous

“I hope they have patented this … Take one look at the picture and you an pretty much work out everything they did: they scanned a load of sawn timber and worked out the best way of sticking it together without unnecessary waste …”

If it’s conceivably obvious to the common man then it would be automatically disqualified for patent protection.

I think you have it the wrong way round :)
wn

If you’re stuck in an old mode of thinking then of course this wouldn’t work. Unfathomable tech (magic) is required to make the flooring and obviously a carpenter whose tools have hardly changed in a century won’t be able to seamlessly duplicate it.

But this technology doesn’t exist in a vacuum. If it’s cheap/easy enough to use for custom floorboards it’s cheap and easy enough for carpenters to get into laser-scanning and CAM routing to custom make pieces to fit any application. The state of the art advanced, what you’ll be able to get an average professional to do will catch up.

By the time you can afford this flooring you’ll be able to hire a carpenter to scan the gap in the floor and, after finding the best match at the log level, have it ground to fit perfectly.

Similarly, even though warping is a real concern it’s chicken-little-ish to declare the practice useless. This might not be an option using the cheapest lumber at the store, but there is lumber (and methods of handling/treating it) that could be used for wide-board, snug-fitting flooring like this. Sure, they’re pricier but fancy wood floors aren’t done when you’re on a budget anyways.

Personally, I think it’s neat but aesthetically out of place in a modern box home. But it sure would make an awesome hobbit-hole, and computer-aided carpentry will sure make that sort of thing easier in many other ways.
Kerouac

Love it for what it is – unique and beautiful. Any ‘green’ claims are at best exaggerated and more likely flat-out deceptive.
Anonymous

What if odd shaped wood is spaced out farther and waste from the cutting process (saw dust) is used to make composite material to fill in the gaps? This way nothing is wasted.
elsuperjeffe

seems to have more value as a wall surface than a floor surface. the stuff is awesomely gorgeous but repair would just be a bitch.
Anonymous

I bet those savings don’t come cheap.
Anonymous

As an owner of a house that has nothing but hardwood floors, I would want to mention that this is an advantage aesthetically only. The utility simply isn’t there…laying this floor would be incredibly difficult. I’m not convinced there would be less waste, as it would be far more difficult to replace any board not cut perfectly to length.

Not only that, the upkeep would be difficult. These would *have* to be kiln dried, otherwise the swelling and adjustments as they dry would create very strange buckling…not the predictable buckling that comes from standard HW flooring. And even with kiln drying, odd buckling/stretching would still likely happen.

Not to mention cleaning! As anyone w/ hardwood floors know, they are a pain to keep clean because of how dirt can fall in the cracks…so any hw-floor owner probably sweeps/mops in the direction of the cracks to get the most dirt. Obviously, with this setup, it would not be so easy. The only real solution would be to seal it, which, IMO, takes away from some of the fun and beauty of having hardwood floors (not to mention additional work).

Again – these floors are beautiful. However, I don’t think they are functionally as great as the article implies.
traalfaz

Good luck when there’s damage to a board or two and you need to replace them.
- DoctressJulia
  
  Party pooper. I think this is beauuuuutiful. I love the organic curvyness of it. Yay!
timquinn

Here’s a funny thing, neither the post above nor the website index page linked above make any claim for this products “green-ness.”

Where do these arguments get started?

And from only one link away:

It is a mass market product intended to replace something only available from craftsman previously. This would imply packaging and shipping issues.

The optimization seems to be more about taking a pile of number two lumber with unfortunate knots and defects and making it into a pile of high quality clear flooring. Not a bad trade off, but more to the advantage of the mill than the customer.

Burning scrap is a last ditch attempt to extract value from the wood. It shouldn’t be considered equivalent to a use that will last years. The more wood that can be saved from the furnace the better.
Anonymous

Interestingly, modern lumber mills already scan and sort logs in much the same way to calculate the maximum amount of cut wood per log. So the arguments about how much energy consumption computers would add to this process are moot–the cutting and calculation are both largely computerized, so the question of wood wastage in pursuit of perfectly straight lines is a valid one.
RedShirt77

Yeah, all well and good until a future owner needs to replace one board and has to rib out the entire floor.

Pretty though.
- Niklas
  
  You already have to do exactly that with unilin or fiboloc or other “click-lock” floor tiles. No difference.
glatt1

Modern saw mills don’t waste any wood at all. The scraps and saw dust are burned to produce power to run the mill.

The entire premise is built upon a straw man argument.

These floors are neat and interesting, but selling them on efficiency or how green they are is wrong.
omnivore

@niklaus :

the precision a log — or a plank — is machined to doesn’t affect its expansion and contraction, but a log building has gravity keeping all the components in contact with each other, so the example is irrelevant.

Wide-planked floors are very common here in Canada in older buildings as subflooring. In houses of mine I’ve had to refloor, we’ve found planking up to 16″ wide in houses 100+ years old. But we were reflooring areas where some of the floors were original, and the 3″ (7.5cm) wide quarter-sawn oak that was laid there is available today. But in 1900 plenty of wider oak raw stock was available, and the costs and difficulty of machining flooring was greater. Still, no-one wanted wide planks, because they understood why narrow planks work better.

The fact that among Europeans, who lost all their hardwood reserves 300 years ago, there is a poorly informed group who value wide planks — and often of softwood — that gratify a vanity and aesthetic that is based on a misunderstanding of the material is expected.
- Niklas
  
  Why the angry tone?
  
  You need to explain further why gravity affects one type of wood and not another type because the way you phrased it it does not make sense. Both types are machined to a very fine precision, both are treated before and after machining. No difference.
  
  Narrow planks do not work better, that is a myth. Just because you have more and smaller items does not make it sturdier or less prone to breaking or scratching or discoloring.
  
  Where are your sources that these people are poorly informed?
  
  You are also flat out lying when you say they use soft wood when in fact they use hard wood (Oak sapwood, something you would have discovered if you actually visited the linked site).
Don

I would guess that this technology makes it possible to use logs that would have been unacceptable at a traditional mill. If those logs were wasted before (as opposed to simply letting the trees live), then we’re diverting waste to something more useful.

Another guess: since the shape of each board is calculated, it should be possible to deliver the shape files with the boards. Then if I need a replacement for one particular plank, I should be able to specify exactly what I need.
Napalm Dog

Sometimes the aesthetic of a thing is reason enough to do it. If it’s a little stronger to boot, more reason to do it. If it adds character, individuality and value to a home, hey! Still more reasons!

I’ve wanted to put solar panels on the floors of all the well-lit rooms in a house. Sure, it might be considered absurd. But if looks neat and is unique, to me it’s as cool as going out of your way to paint your bicycle the color you want; Costly and wasteful in aspects, but unique, pleasing and yours in others…
omnivore

@niklas :

The school bell is ringing. Time for your lesson, I hope it will be interesting.

First, the intuitive idea that small boards will not be more sturdy than the larger piece they were cut from sounds intuitively right. This is what I call “designer thinking” : find the first rationale that supports your idea and stop inquiring. The part of your response about small planks being no more sturdy etc depends on this.

But reflect on what a floor does: It supports us, and provides an attractive surface to walk on and move things around. As we and our furniture move around on a floor, over decades any small exposed edges between planks will be subjected to lateral stresses as feet, socks, boots and the legs of furniture contact them. As the gap between planks increases, this destructive effect increases rapidly. Floors wear out when the thin grooves are stressed repeatedly. A small gap all but eliminates this stress.

Starting from the idea that a part of a matrix will share its characteristics, expansion, expressed as a percentage is the same for a narrow plank as a wide one. But because the expansion is a percentage, the actual gap will be proportionate to the width of the board. Hence, narrow boards are better because the gaps are proportionately smaller, and the destructive stresses are lower.

The second bit of designer thinking is that fewer larger gaps represent the same aggregate gap as many narrow ones, hence it’s all the same. But again, the size of the gap determines the maximum size of particle that can lodge in the gap. A 1 mm gap presents a lodging place only for particles under 1mm, while fewer but larger gaps allow far more material to lodge, since much of it will be over 1mm. This material includes food and skin and dust, meaning that a narrow-gap floor will be more hygienic.

An important but neglected part of traditional wood floor is of course the use of waxes and oils. These have specific capacity to bridge gaps: in a floor with wide gaps, they are more or less useless in their function of closing gaps with a flexible, water-resistant barrier to dirt and food etc. But at gaps of 1 or 2mm, they flexibly allow the gap to be closed, making the floor what it is meant to be: a continuous surface resistant to the passage of moisture and dirt. Remember too, that dirt that travels across the floor barrier will accumulate in the spaces between joists eventually, making these areas more attractive to small vermin. And, if particles accumulate at all, they will then prevent the wood from closing up when the moisture level increases again. And if that were not enough, moisture is usually lowest in winter, also when houses become most attractive to vermin like mice and insects, seeking warmth an a food source.

Now consider the actual behaviour of buildings. Floors in a room of (eg) 5 or 6 meter span will flex several centimeters under even relatively modest loads — say the entry or exit of 6 or ten people. Any flex can be expressed as the mean angular deviation across a given distance. A narrow plank, representing a short distance, requires a small amount of flex; a wide board represents a greater distance, a greater angle, and therefore more flex and higher stresses on the crucial tongue and grooves. (A floor that has received adequate waxing will also benefit from the ability of the wax to lubricate these joints). Even without load, buildings can flex considerably over time, and a narrow plank floor will respond better to this than wide plank floors. Tongue and groove strength is a function of thickness, not width, so wide boards have T&G structures that are no stronger than those on narrow planks. Wood has finite flexibility, and then reacts with breakage that tends to propagate quickly along the grain: the same direction and the tongues, destroying the integrity of the plank. Incidentally, this also favours short planks, although other things mitigate against them.

To address your canard regarding log buildings : I would think it is obvious that in log construction, the contact and relationship between elements is vertical, and therefore has gravity pressing them together. Higher or lower loads don’t change this, and don’t introduce flex stresses that floors experience; and however large or small a gap exists between members, no lateral abrasive forces analogous to the movement of furniture across a floor exists for walls. Horizontal surfaces are usually not made of logs, apart from support members. I outlined this in my reply to you more briefly, but you didn’t seem to get it, so I’m saying it again.

As for flat out lying — how silly you look now. I was not referring to what the company uses, but to your remark about wide planks in Europe in #42. Second, I was clear that I was referring to both hard and softwood. I spend reasonable amounts of time in Europe and elsewhere, and softwood has been very popular there: one company that I am connected to here in Toronto makes a decent business disassembling old barns and resawing the fir and spruce timbers and shipping them to Europe for exactly this purpose.

Don’t feel obliged to apologize for wrongly calling me a liar, by the way: an apology from someone who isn’t prepared to actually read what someone writes before flying off the handle is taken as seriously as the criticism is — that is, barely at all.

Finally, as to hostility: I think this is the final example of designer thinking: when what Freud calls the Reality Principle intrudes on the pleasurable fantasy that a designer comes up with, opposition is treated as hostility, philistinism or a lack of aesthetic sense. Those who treat something as subtle as traditional flooring in the simplistic and facile way that some clearly do, and completely miss the really beautiful way that proportion and technique developed over a millenium or more work together are the ones who lack aesthetic sense in my view. But as I said in my first post, they and you are free to discover the virtues of tried and true methods in more expensive ways than the rest of us.
AGC

I’m fascinated by how detailed building code is, detailing to a human hair the size of a nail’s head, height of a door knob, thickness of drywall.

As for custom made wood floors. I’m picture a giant warehouse of thousands of pieces of oddly shaped planks, with a large robotic arm carefully selecting each, maybe lots of conveyor belts.
omnivore

The straight lines of conventional planking allows the wood to move unencumbered along its length. This system may be beautiful, but it ignores what carpenters and furniture makers have known for centuries: wide boards are rarely desirable, and this system appears to make a virtue out of maximizing the width of planks.

Conventional planking is optimized to allow the natural movement of wood, and plank are narrow to minimize the expansion gap between boards as they change shape over the seasons.

Even well dried lumber changes shape considerably with humidity and time, and when I see shapes that interlock the planks and prevent movement along their lengths, I’d expect that it’s also locking up stresses that will result in cracking, broken tongues and poor performance over time.

As with many things, long-lasting methods have virtues. These are often lost on the superficial and facetious, who are easily seduced by the latest puerile sales pitch. They are free to discover the virtues of tried and true methods in more expensive ways than the rest of us.

As for the energy consumption argument: a decent wood floor should last 30 to 80 years. If, as I suspect, this marvel of the age causes a higher failure rate than conventional floor, any gains by the use of saved wood are imaginary, to be charitable.
- Niklas
  
  Wide planks have been, and still is, all the rage here in Europe at least. They sell like hotcakes for the aesthetics alone. And for what it is worth: Log cabins around these parts of the country are axed very precise, down to fractions of centimetres.
Fef

Agree with #13 and #16: I’d be taking really good care of that floor.

But I think walking on that floor could cause vertigo. This could be very challenging for anyone with inner ear or proprioception problems.
- Niklas
  
  Vertigo?
Don

I keep hearing how hard it would be to repair, but I don’t repair wood floors myself, whether curvy or straight. I find someone who knows how, and pay him—same way I intend to get it installed in the first place.

No dealers listed until next month, the bastards.
Cowicide

Form, function… what’s not to love? Want.
Tony

That’s awesome, althought if I were a contractor and someone asked me to install that floor I would take one look at the jigsaw puzzle of pieces and quadruple my rate.
- Anonymous
  
  I bet the pieces are numbered on their undersides.
  
  The replacement issue is a very good point. Here is hoping you never get flooding or the floor buckles.
tw15

So what happens when/if you cut a plank too short, and you need to use another one to replace it?
Grey Devil

Really love the floorboards. They have a really nice set of pictures in a gallery on their site. My problem with the concept is that the floorboards would really be irreplaceable, or pretty damn near to it. Still i would really want something like this installed in a nook, personal library, or something of the sorts.
Anonymous

Replacement boards may be difficult, but not impossible. A others have said, wood floors are durable to start with. If damage does occur then there are a couple of options. You could simply use the damage board as a template and fit a new board in it’s place. While not very high tech it’s a woodworking technique that;s been around since humans started working with wood. The other option would be to call the factory and have them duplicate the piece. I would assume they would keep records for this purpose.

I think the argument about conserving resources and efficiency in manufacturing is a moot point. This is going to be an expensive, niche product. It is not a replacement for Joe Homebuilder’s wood floor kit in tract homes.
Richard Kirk

I hope they have patented this. I am not a great fan of patents, but this is one of those ideas that the system exists to protect. Take one look at the picture and you an pretty much work out everything they did: they scanned a load of sawn timber and worked out the best way of sticking it together without unnecessary waste. Any computer-literate one of us could have done it. Its obvious once you have seen the picture. But none of us did. Dammit!

You can surely get replacement boards. It might be a bit trickier to find a board where the neighbours on both sides have already been determined, but one of the less knotty bits of wood ought to have less constraints, so it could fit. It would not be difficult to record every floor, and keep a record of the shape. A good photo ought to identify the plank to be replaced.
alowishus

This is beautiful and I definitely want it regardless of its “greeness.”

Now the real trick will be growing a floor like that without having to cut anything.