Steve: Did you know that last year, more than 2 million homes had hardboard floors installed in them? That’s more than 19,000 acres of hardboard floor. Today we’re at the Mannington Hardwood Floor Factory in Highpoint, North Carolina where they take veneers like this, really rough looking veneers, and turn them into beautiful hardwood floors. Joining me is John Himes with Mannington Floors. Hi! John.
John: Steve, how are you?
Steve: Now I understand this factory you make engineered wood floors that’s the one I’m holding right here. What’s the difference between an engineered wood floor and a traditional plank hardwood floor?
John: Traditional plank hardwood floors are usually ¾ inch solid hardwood. And so what we do here in this factory is take multiple veneers like you see all around us and construct a very stable platform by laying them in a cross crane construction. And from there, we take it through the rest of the process put a finish on a creative, beautiful hardwood floor. And I can show you that process. It’s pretty amazing.
Steve: Okay John, floorming.
John: You got it. All right so Steve what we have happening here is if you look down this line, we take those individual veneers and what we do is we put a glue line on each of them and as they go down we build that cross crane construction sandwich glue line after glue line. So when it gets down to the very end you actually have five plies from the top to the bottom all with a nice glue line. From there, we’re going to take it into the presses down the end of this line.
Steve: Okay so it does with the press machine, now how much pressure is it getting in there?
John: It’s got a very intense heating pressure. You got about 150 pounds per square inch and the heat goes up to about 235 degrees Fahrenheit. After that, we’re going to pull it out of the press into a cooling tower to try and stabilize the temperature a little bit. And then from there, we’ll move in to calibration.
Steve: So what happens in calibration?
John: In calibration, we’re going to do two things. We’re going to first put a reference edge on that panel so that we always got one square inch to work up of. And secondly, we’re going to sand both the face and the back of the panel to get uniform thickness and consistency which will give us a nice looking floor when the ply is all done. After that, we move it into rip saws which will actually cut it into rough size planks like you see here that actually have a tunnel on one side and a groove on the other. And you could actually see here the five plies that we were discussing earlier.
Steve: That’s really cool. Now these planks then are separated and they move into this machine over here. What goes on inside here?
John: All we’re going to do in here is add a tunnel to one side and a groove to the other side of the length.
Steve: The long side of plank.
John: Absolutely.
Steve: And from there, it moves on for the double line.
John: You bet.
Steve: Okay, so what are these women doing right there? What are they doing?
John: What you see them doing is they’re actually taking a look at the face of that wood product and they’re making sure that any defects that might be their nuts or mineral streaks, they’re going mark them. So that we can actually take that plank and use the rest of it that still a perfectly good plank. So what they’ll do is take that plank, mark it, and then will send it to the next station to have to have that cut off.
Steve: Now I see in this next station these cool laser lights are kind of beaming onto the wood. What’s this laser all about?
John: Absolutely, what we do is we have laser lights every three inches that allows the operator to actually take a look at where the defect is, applying the plank up to maximize cutting off the least amount that we have cut off and using most of our valuable resource. From there, we now have a nice finished piece of plank that we can put through the finish line.
Steve: So what’s going on here?
John: Yeah what you see happening now is we actually take the white wood like we have and we’re applying a stain to it now to give it to a color that we’re going to be manufactured. From there, we’re going to start adding coats of UV curable urethanes.
Steve: Now it looks like maple syrup but it’s actually a polymer.
John: Yeah, the reservoir, it’s a polymer of urethane and that’s applied that goes thru UV banks of lights to help cure that urethane out and some of those urethanes contain aluminum oxide which is ultra hard particulate that you can’t get down on the floor in the send on site job but you can hear. And what that does is will give you excellent scratch resistance.
Got a little demonstration here for you, what you see is the, a plank with aluminum oxide or that scratch resist finish, steel wall takes them right off.
Steve: The shine is gone.
John: Absolutely, come over here, one wind scratch resist in that aluminum oxide, no damage whatsoever.
Steve: Still shiny, amazing.
John: Absolutely, it’s great.
Steve: We’re here literally at the end of the line. They’re packing up the century of wood, putting them in the box and shipping them around the country. Tell me the from the consumers point of view, what’s the advantage of engineered wood over traditional ply?
John: Real easy. There are two key things. Number one is structural stability. We’ve seen today when you build that cross planking construction, it won’t warp, twist, or buckle the way ordinary three quarter inch solid wood floors can. And the second is that finish. If you see that scratch resistant finish, you just can’t create that anywhere but a factory like this. You can’t do it in a home send onsite job.
Steve: And this factory puts out how much engineered wood every month?
John: Over two and a half million square feet every single month.
Steve: That’s amazing. John thank you so much. Terrific factory tour, there wasn’t a single moment where I was bored. I’m sorry, if you want more information on Mannington floors, check out their toll free number at 1-800-356-6787, that’s 1-800-356-6787.
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