With a band saw, making wood floors as a hobby can turn into a successful small business

Nils Ohlin, tells us how he plans and prepares to change his office work routine to the creative work of producing custom wooden floors

I work as a project manager on a construction site, which is mostly office work. For me, it's very relaxing to come home and work with my hands. My goal is to devote all my time to this work here at home in a few years. It started as a hobby, but it's not a hobby anymore! My production is very small and very specialised. The idea is to make only custom-made floors. The product itself requires a lot of craftsmanship and is meant to last for generations. My typical customers want a unique product - something no one else has.

Some customers even give me the lumber themselves. Possibly some farms have been owned by the same family for hundreds of years. So they can take a tree grown there and make it into flooring in the house. We have developed this business over the last 5 years. What I find really great about this idea is that I can do everything from felling the tree in the forest, transporting it home and then cutting, drying and processing the complete material to the finished flooring product.

For me, the whole process of transforming raw material into finished product is important. There are many different tasks involved and you also need to know quite a lot about machinery to control the whole process. I actually do have a lot of oak on my property. I simply take a small tree-cutting machine and go and fell the tree, cut it down and take the branches off. Then I bring it home and put it on the band saw. Once the log is cut, a lot of traditional work has to be done - sorting the pieces, stacking them before drying.

You also need to leave a small carbon footprint - there's been a lot of talk about this lately. I heat my buildings with the waste from the milling process and use it to power the drying kiln. It's very good for the carbon footprint. I work with wood with a lot of life in it, because my goal is to make a living product. This makes the material harder to work with, because wood has higher values of tension and internal motility. The biggest secret to making it work is to work with the natural properties of the wood. You have to adapt the process to the properties of the wood.

The hardest part of the process is that all cutting operations have to be very accurate in terms of measurements. If not, you won't be able to lay the flooring. Wood is a living material and I don't think I've ever been able to make two pieces that are exactly the same.

The LT40 bandsaw's ability to cut large sizes - this was the important aspect for me. With the Wood-Mizer you have simple and stable functionality. Things have been designed so that you can work on your own.

Ribbon saw I had before was from 1990. Since then the design of band saws has developed a lot and the new LT40 I recently bought is so professional I could work full time to support myself just cutting lumber. I definitely recommend it, I'm really very pleased with the bandsaw and its functions.

Air-drying wood takes ten weeks. Then we kiln dry it to 4.5%. In the last week we add water once more to bring it to 8.5% before removing it. It makes the material more stable.

It's a real pleasure to see the finished product, knowing what part you played in making it. The feeling of completeness, of being able to make all these beautiful oak floors, is pretty great..

Author: Nils Ohlin, Sweden

Sbear: www.woodmizer.ro