Puncheon Cabin Floors.

[garry3]

After reading part of this diary ( Rebecca Foster 1840-1907) I decided to look into what she was talking about with "puncheon floors".
From the diary..
"About 1841 or 42 they moved to Yell Co and settled in what now is Briggville. It was at that place was my first recollection. It was new country and there were no mills of any sort close by. That is when I first remember the sawed plank puncheon floors hewed out of logs and board doors, cedar rails and pigpens ____. Oh, that dear, good clear running spring that we had down under the hill. I will never forget, the men made all the chairs, plow stocks and wagons, in fact, nearly everything was made at home."

It would be my guess that the only part of the of the puncheon floors that were sawn would be the ends? Were flooring hatchets developed to hew the sides of similar floor boards so they fit tight?
These folks are doing a restoration of a 1828 log structure also in Arkansas.

I suspect there may be more than one member here that could tell me more about these floors and cabins from this period in general.

 

[Ernest DuBois]

Just a month ago down in the French village I was working on a restoration and came across one of these floors for the first time in real life.
.

Pascale who was overseeing things had until then also never come across such a floor and could not figure out how the planks were produced, since they had no tool or machine marks he could identify, and asked if I had any thoughts. Having a look, it was clear to me that the planks were riven, since I'd had some experience doing that kind of work plus it made sense in other ways.

Pascale, a man of action, lead us off to where the village maintains its wood supply, trees harvested from the area and kept for use, building material, fencing, whatever. What needs to be understood is that riven work requires a certain minimal standard of qualities; a somewhat central pith, relatively straight grain, free of twist and no knots, to name a few critical ones. We chose out one section of a big old oak that looked like a good candidate. It had a diameter of I guess about 40 - 50 cm which I thought we could get some nice quartered sections out of if we had some luck.
Earlier I'd had a quick look at the planks to get an idea of some basic dimensions which we would try matching in the experiment. The longest planks were around 90 cm, the thickest ±4 cm. Each row of planks butting the adjoining one at the center of the joists supported above a girt and laid up loosely.

The experiment went better than expected and yielded straight and uniform planks even though I was under equipped ending up busting my good mallet on the froe and lacking a decent sledge and wedges. Unfortunately I got no good photos of this having much to do with the fact that that work was incidental to the work at hand. Only this shot with the bundled up planks lying there like that which I left for Pascale to further fit & experiment with in his own good time.

When I did go back for a closer look at the individual planks I found out the old carpenters were smarter than I was and instead of splitting out quarter sections from an oversized billet they were making rifted boards from smaller billets and using the entire cross-section including the sap wood, splitting through the pith, that former being a questionable choice since this has ended up attracting an infestation.

Such a floor differs from those old cabin floors in, for one thing, that these are from shorter sections, having to do with the qualities of the stock material and also that the floors in the French house never were intended for providing a living surface, the up-stairs attic section of the house used only for grain or feed storage which is why you see in one picture above of the construction as a whole the covering from on top of clay about 3 cm thick, the same clay but then with a different composition used as infill in the half-timbered gable ends and plaster.
I really do appreciate the logic and economy of this technique and hope to get back to this or other similar work in the future and would like to hear from others with any experience even when it has not so much to do with axe work, though it could.I have to wonder how it would compare with the laminate made from USA hardwoods, sent to the low wage country in Asia , glued and milled in the factories and shipped back for customers to buy at their local tin box store with the mega parking lot.

 

[Old Axeman]

I have worked on quite a few puncheon floor structures. In America I have found three different styles--hewn sleepers set in the sill plates above grade with the puncheon floor on top (best); hewn sleepers on grade with puncheon floor on top; and the worst system is the puncheon floor laid right on grade. The video guys had it all correct. The guy with the adze had good tool control even though I did not think much of his choice of an adze. The puncheon floor boards that I found were riven out of halfed logs. They were not nominal thickness, so they were laid level by notching over each sleeper. The idea of quartering the log is a waist of time, you still end up with the same amount of sap wood in the floor. You just have two floor boards instead of one. I have only found puncheon floors in log houses and barns (including log and timber frame barns) The puncheon boards are riven sap wood edge to sap wood edge. I will digress now and tell you about three horizontal log houses that had split (riven) and then broad axe hewn wall logs. The hewn flats were up to 24" exposed surface ! Multiple wall logs were riven from one large dia. log. The floors in all three were also riven puncheon.

 

[Ernest DuBois]

Here I am spreading lies widely on the forum. After saying that the instance in France was my first encounter I remembered once crashing in an old log shack that was built for traders traveling the old Stockholm to Trondheim route. Well it's still there and open for anyone to use so I took advantage once and noticed how the floor was constructed using split logs which span the entire length of the building with no intermediate girding, which explains the need for such mass.

If you notice the multi-purpose elevated platforms in the four corners, they have a similar construction and the exposure at the corner shows the joinery having a deep notch to give stability, plane out the top surface and accommodate nailing.

This notching very suited to axe work.
I notice also that the flooring technique is enjoying a revival in parts of Scandinavia.

 

[Ernest DuBois]

As you can see, producing these single span elements is a tricky thing indeed, even though my sense is that these Swedes are going at it with perhaps an excess of caution. Thinking in terms of a contemporary and practical application , ( of course when it comes to a restoration you've got not so much scope for deviation), limiting the lengths to French dimensions is a smart operation and when the planks are quartered and from oak, a good chance for a highly refined result, I mean even if you were to go the authentic route and surface with tools but otherwise choose to sand with a rolling belt sander finishing off in the edges and corners with the disc sander in the modern way.
Didn't someone once post up the worker reproducing an old Korean flooring technique out in the woods that made use of these short thick planks? If only he had been clued in enough to limit the uniformity of those planks to the ends where it was necessary he would't have had to go into town and get his materials milled and could have gotten all he needed on the spot himself.

 

[rjdankert]

FWIW, here is a video from a channel I subscribe to on YouTube using short floor boards.

"Mr. Chickadee
Published on Dec 15, 2018


SUBSCRIBED 110K

In this video we finish our traditional wooden floor without nails by adding the floorboards themselves to the joists we prepared in the last video.

This floor is our own version of a korean 우물마루 (umulmaru) technique. Our technique differs from classical korean in the use of japanese joinery and a sliding dovetail to hold the boards.

There are many ways one could accomplish this style of flooring, we chose a method we found to be the best for us, to carve a simple dovetail rebate into each joist then carefully match the ends of the floorboards to this angle. The dovetail prevents any cupping or movement of the boards but allows expansion and contraction and any size board to be used. Other methods used in Korean floors are a simple tongue at the end of each board and a groove carved into the joists to receive it.

To get the boards into the groove, a larger slot is cut out on one end of each joist, letting the boards drop down and slide forward. As the final "capping board" is not restrained by the dovetail rebate as all other boards are, its important that it is a very tightly fit quarter sawn board, as a quarter sawn board should remain the most stable and resist the temptation to cup over time.

A few important points on this floor to remember;

1. all boards are placed bark side up (outside of tree facing up) as is the custom in many asian traditions

2. Either green boards or air dried are best, not kiln dried, as a kiln dried boards may swell exponentially in subsequent humid summers and could actually rupture the buildings frame. If kiln dried wood is used it would be wise to plan for and accomodate any excessive expansion with extra covered space on one end of the rows, or the most simple solution, to utilize "galloping joists" which sit atop the carrying beams instead of flush with them.
Our floor is semi dry, boards being milled and air drying 6 months. As they continue to dry they can be tightened up.

3. Capping boards should be either single large quarter sawn boards, or made up of several slimmer quarter sawn peices joined together."

Bob

 

[Hairy Clipper]

Thank you for the puncheon floor lessons gentlemen! Interesting! Looks to be a very strong floor.