Overdone construction

[Eigenvector]

Have you ever encountered a previous owner's handiwork that you just wanted to strangle them over? I'm in the process of removing the 1/2" plywood over

2x4 flooring in the basement - in order to give me headroom and I've honestly never had this much trouble.

I'm going at this stuff with a 36" wrecking bar, sawsall, hammer, the only thing I haven't used is a stick of dynamite. The previous owner used a 10 penny nail every 4 inches into 2x4's 1 foot apart under the plywood. He must have spend a few thousand on materials - but it sure is the most stable and durable floor I've ever walked on. Too bad I bonk my head on the ceiling joists.

The biggest problem that I've encountered so far is that the plywood comes apart when pulled up, rather than pulling the nails up with it. So I'm basically having to remove the plywood 4" square at a time. I was hoping to re-use the materials for a workbench - but unless the going gets better the stuff will be shredded beyond usefulness.

[BobK207]

I may not be understanding the situation but.......can you cats paw the nails out? & thus make the removal easier & potentially reuse the ply?

I used to have to demo plywood (3/8", 7/16 OSB, 15/32" STR I, 1/2") shearwalls after testing them.....we used to cats paw out the nails using a HEAVY plastic headed hammer. The plywood had big gouges every

4 or 6" but it was usable for other apps.

cheers Bob

[Eigenvector]

Maybe I don't understand the term "cat paw". I've tried getting under it with the claw of my hammer but no luck. The plywood is swollen a bit from moisure build-up, and whoever installed the floor did a damn good job, nails are all very tight, very straight, and very in there.

[Harry K]

"Wonder Bar" is one type. Has a flat pry on one end and claws at a right angle on the other. A little work on a grinder to sharpen the claws is a big help.

Harry K

[DanG]

A cat&#39;s paw is a carpenter&#39;s term for a tool that is made for digging out nails. They work well. Once you break the head off the nail, they don&#39;t help. They gouge out a fair little chunk of wood to get up under the nail. Here is a picture of one: <

the whole world singing . . . . DanG (remove the sevens) [e-mail]

[-zero]

I would rent a larger portable circular saw (10-12") with a carbide toothed blade. Set the height to just about cut all the way through or just shy by about 1/32".

As long as you are POSITIVE there are no power lines or conduit run underneath, just cut out 4&#39; x 8&#39; sections ( or a little smaller if your working solo) and lift them out with a crowbar.

Also, find a garden hoe. Cut the handle off at the socket. Use a small angle grinder to put a sharp edge on the blade and use it like a wood chisel, along with a baby sledge hammer, to cut through the uncut bottom of the 2 x 4&#39;s.

You&#39;ll be an old pro just about the time your finished. :o)

-zero

[<aemeijers]

(snip)

No, &#39;Wonder bars&#39;, great as the are, are something different. A Cats Paw is a cross between a a chisel and a small prybar. It has a small almost spherical cupped end on it, very sharp, with a narrow tapered groove, designed for extracting nails and not much else. You place the &#39;paw&#39; end so the groove will catch the nail, and wack the backside of it with a hammer, to drive t under the head of the nail you want to remove. For little nails, you can just rock the bar back. For bit nails, you sometimes have to get another &#39;bite&#39; further down the nail, or turn the hammer sideways inder the paw to provide a raised fulcrum. An indispensible tool for repair work and demolition. Any good tool store should have them.

But as to OP&#39;s problem- Life is too short to worry about salvaging 100 bucks worth of plywood. Use a circular saw to cut through the ply parallel to each sleeper, and rock the long strips back and forth to loosen them up. Unless he also glued it together with construction adhesive, you should be able to pull the 2x4 and plywood strips up 4 feet at a time.

aem sends....

[BobK207]

EV-

Sorry about that......I was introduced tothe cats paw by a contractor / framer turned CE student this was a number of years ago. He had a Japanese style one that worked much better than the typical US available one.

here&#39;s a link to the type we used, I still use this type to this day. The COP does damage th wood a lot but the Japanese style one less so

when you use a cats paw do not hit it with a milled face hammer.......you&#39;ll just mess up both tools. Place the short end point about 1/2" from the nail head, use the long end as a handle, hold the long handle closer the the plywood than 45 deg.....more like 30 deg. Hit that puppy with a sharp, heavy blow..enough the get the points & V groove under the nail head. Rock the cats paw back to slightly pull the nail. Typically we "started" all the nails with the CP & finished them with a long crow bar.

That should do the trick.....the plywood will be a gouged up mess but it will be usable.

cheers Bob

[Eigenvector]

Ah, thanks. I know what you&#39;re talking about now.

As AEM says, that isn&#39;t gonna happen. I have the sawsall, so at this point I think that&#39;s what I&#39;m gonna do, it will just take time to do it.

Maybe if I can get a section of the flooring removed, I can get sufficient room to really use the wrecking bar, right now its tough because there&#39;s really no place for the bar to grip.

I just can&#39;t stand dismantling overdone work like this, and its one of the other reasons why I prefer screws to nails.

[RicodJour]

There is one specific tool that is tailor-made for your situation.

It&#39;s a cross between a slaphammer and a catspaw. The jaws are opened, placed on either side of the nailhead about to die, slide the weighted tail piece up the shaft/handle and then slap it down. That drives the jaws into the wood and closes them around the nailhead. Pull back on the handle to lock the jaws and lever the nail out. If it&#39;s a recalcitrant bastid, slide the handle out to gain more leverage. The tool works like a champ, can pull big ass nails that are really stuck in there, the pincer jaws squezze tighter as you exert more pressure back on the lever, and best of all, it doesn&#39;t damage the wood as much as other pullers. The tool is a century old design and is not well known nowadays. You can find them on eBay for cheap as they&#39;re not rare. Search for nail puller.

R

[Bob F]

Exactly what I was thinking to suggest. I picked up one of those at a garage sale. It&#39;s one of the most useful tools I own.

Bob

[BobK207]

>

IMO the cats paw will be faster & less messy. The trick to using it with speed is to set the cats paw with asingle hammer blow & then rock the cats paw to get the nail head high enough for a large crow bar.

The single blow is the key....you have to hit the s...t out of it to get a good enough purchse of the nai head. Two guys to slavage the sheets & framing timber of a 8 x 8 shall faster with the cats paw & crow bar faster than using a skilsaw. Of course if you&#39;re just trashing all the material the saw will be quciker,

cheers Bob

[Greg Guarino]

When I was a teenager we had some rot under part of our basement floor. The word "part" is the key here. My Dad had to take up the whole floor, including the undamaged majority. The construction? 2x4s, some sort of wood subfloor, tongue and groove oak, topped with 3/4" ply and vinyl tile. He had nailed the 3/4" ply on about 6" centers.

That adds up to well over 2" of thickness. I&#39;m pretty sure that bullets wouldn&#39;t have penetrated it. The rotted part came out easily enough. The rest wore out a few dozen sawzall blades, back when sawzalls were pretty new. I seem to remember that what we did was cut maybe 3&#39; x 3&#39; squares all the way through, including through the 2x4s, then lift each piece out.

Good luck.

Greg Guarino

[RicodJour]

You can pick them up at garage sale&#39;s for a few bucks. They make great gifts. I have a couple and have given a couple or three as gifts. Any tool that is strange looking, no one else has one, and that works so well is an automatic new favorite.

R

[Harry K]

YOu did notice that I said "one type"?. The true cat&#39;s paw differs only slightly from a wonder bar - to its detriment. The difference being that it does not have the flat pry on one end.

Harry K

[Chris Lewis]

According to Harry K :

But there are other types.

Go to

and do a search for "cats paw". You&#39;ll see two types of cats paw, and several other types of demolition bars.

But my dad has one of the old slide-hammer style. Those are great. Except if you get your finger in the way of the slide-hammer.

[celticsoc]

I had a similar situation, and ultimately ended up getting pieces out by prying along a straight line, moving back a set of nails, and prying out another straight line, etc. I kept on it until I had enough for leverage. By this point, I also was irritated enough that the adrenaline kicked in and helped the project along...the Irish temper worked in my favor. In that, case, though, the main problem was multiple layers of flooring over plywood that had some moisture damage in spots.

Another thought, though, is to go from below. When I was doing concrete work, if we were unable to get a truck to the right spots to pour a basement floor, we would sometimes have to pull the subfloor up. (Bear in mind, this was new construction, with a clear enough view of where we were in relation to the floor above and what was around-electrical, plumbing and such). What we woud do is take a 2x4, find the edge of the plywood, and start banging. Once we pulled (actually pushed would be more accurate) enough nails to have leverage, we would go to the floor above and pull back the plywood. Sometimes it would require a few whacks as it was being pried up. Not easy, but effective in removing the plywood in sheets. That was important, because we would have to put them back down after the pour.

[HerHusband]

Could you use a circular saw to cut away the plywood between the joists, then use a reciprocating saw to cut the nails (and maybe construction adhesive) between the plywood and the top of the joists?

Of course, if your pulling this floor up to gain headroom, are the 2x4&#39;s coming up too? If so, just cut the plywood between joists, and take the plywood and 2x4&#39;s out in big chunks. You could try seperating the plywood from the joists once the whole works is out and accessable.

Either way, it doesn&#39;t sound like you&#39;ll be able to reuse much of the materials.

Anthony