Hardwood Floors February/March 2017

Unique Techniques

Dealing with Out of Level Transitions

Everyone has a table saw, so I will start with that tool’s capability to cut a taper. The table saw fence is parallel to the blade, so any board against it will just be cut to the gap between the two. You can use this as the basis for cutting a taper. First, start by adding an auxiliary fence that has a length two times longer than your tapered rabbet transition needs to be. This fence will guide your workpiece from before the blade all the way through the cut.

Quite often installers face the challenge of meeting up to other floor materials that are not on the same level as our wood floors. The standard solution is to have a baby threshold or some sort of T-mold to cover both floor materials, or a reducer that either slopes down to the other floor or, turned around, would ramp down from the higher floor. Occasionally (and probably more times than we care to count), the materials we run up to are not on the same plane, let alone the same level. That brings new challenges on how to make a decent-looking transition. For an example, let’s imagine a 36” doorway that has stone on the other side of our wood floors. The stone is 3 / 8 ” high on the left side and flush on the right, relative to our wood floor. The transition strip we need is a small saddle, but has to have a sloped underside running from nothing on the right to 3 / 8 ” on the left to accommodate the “out of planeness” one floor is to the other, all the while being even on the wood floor side.

AUXILIARY FENCE

Now that you have the auxiliary fence up, set up the max thickness your transition needs to be; for our example, the mini saddle will be 3” wide x 5 / 8 ” at maximum thickness and making a rabbet that tapers from 0” to 3 / 8 ” in 36”. Set the fence inside blade to 5 / 8 ” and run the board through for thickness, usually a double cut for a 3” wide board. For your 36” piece, add a 3 / 8 ” chip of wood to the face at the “0” end the rabbet has to run down to. The chip only needs to be about ¼” wide, but well stuck to the board face. Blue tape and superglue (or hot melt glue) make this easy to stick on and easy to take off when gluing the block to the board face.

There are a few ways to deal with making the mini saddle transition that has an underside tapered rabbet, depending on what tools you have at your disposal.

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