Looking for a showroom with bamboo floors...

[jtpr]

...in the NH, MA, ME area. Or a nice person that wants to show me ones in their house.

Any pointers?

-Jim

[TH]

Lumber Liquidators has samples and may have bamboo installed in a section of the store

[goaway]

[Karl S]

I could have written this about my bamboo floor.

Mine is a floating product from Ikea called Kvist. Not only is it soft (yesterday I dropped a cabinet knob on it from about 3 feet and it dented) but it has a very poor finish. I have coated it with two coats of polyurethane which is a great improvement.

It looks beautiful when you first install it, though.

I have read that some bamboo is very hard and durable, so if you decide on bamboo, do some research.

[Jimbo]

Ikea don't do bamboo floors. They do laminates with a bamboo pattern.

Bamboo itself is medium hard. It comes in at 1642 on the Janka hardness scale. At one end of the scale is Douglas Fir which comes in at 660 and, at the other, the extremely hard and expensive Brazilian Walnut at 3800. Bamboo is harder than red or white oak or hard maple.

[Karl S]

What an idiotic thing to say.

As I said in my post, they sell a bamboo floor product called Kvist.

[TinWoodsmn]

As I reported in a previous post, bamboo isn't the best flooring material. I have 'engineered' bamboo, 'toasted'. This comes in on the Janka scale around

1200 pounds, not psi. The rest of the 'engineering' consists of two crossed plantation pine layers, whatever plantation pine is. The bamboo is 1/8" thick, the whole assembly is 9/16" thick. The Janka test could only have been proposed by people not interested in informing the public of the hardness of materials. The test imbeds a .444" dia steel ball into the material being tested. When the ball penetrates .222", the force in pounds needed is the Janka hardness...

Look elsewhere for flooring material for areas with moderate to heavy traffic.

Tin Woodsmn

[J. Clarke]

Uh, that's basically the same method that the Rockwell and Brinnell tests use for determining the hardness of metals, only difference is the size of the penetrator and the amount of force. Sounds like a pretty fair imitation of a punker pogoing in cockroach stillettos to me.

On the other hand, Brazilian Walnut (which is usually called "ipe" and isn't all that expensive) isn't the other end of the scale--lignum vitae goes to 4500, and I believe there are a few others between. And I can say from personal experience that ipe can knock a dent in hard maple without showing a mark, and LV can do the same to ipe.

Incidentally "bamboo" covers a lot of territory--one flooring site lists "natural bamboo" at 1410 and "carmel bamboo" at 1120, with a notation that "will vary substantially from different manufacturers". Another lists 1640 for "timber grass bamboo". Horizontal vs vertical grain makes a difference too. And I suspect that there are species of bamboo out there that don't come close to hitting that

1120.

Personally I wouldn't want the stuff--grew up around bamboo--it's amazingly tough stuff, but I've gotten too many bamboo splinters in my life to want to be walking on it.

[beans]

I second the above post. My friends had a bamboo floor put in less than 6 months ago and just mentioned that with 3 golden retrievers, the floor is getting dented by the dogs' nails, despite the nails being clipped regularly. In the wild bamboo does seem soft - well softer than a hardwood. We had Pergo put in abut the saem time and our floor does not show any dog nail marks. I think Pergo is harder although less exotic.

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