Does anybody know anything about the quality of LL product lines? I have seen some of their engineered woods with a very thin veneer and the total height of 5/16.
How much veneer should there be so as to consider it a good engineered floor or is that or the total height not a concern? It is going on a concrete floor in a high rise condo.
Have you ever heard of Schon Hardwood floor Maufacturer or a type of hard wood called
Curupay?
Lastly how are Bruce hardwood engineered floors as far as quality is concerned?

if it sounds too cheap then you more than likely will get whatyou pay for. a 5/16" floor is typically a disposable entry level bargin basement type floor. I would buck up to 3/8" and look for a decent wear layer which is going to be a challenge itself.

Not that big a challenge. MIRAGE makes a beautiful, near perfect product that is 3/8th inches overall thickness with a heavy wear surface (almost half the thickness of the floor. Only down-side is the many short pieces.

Schon is a clean milled product, a pleasure to install.

The BIG downside IMO... The finish is very suspect to scratching , easily.
Due to the thin top layer, regardless of species, and underneath soft plys, the denting & impact resistance is a problem as well.

So... Nice to install , but performance issues.

You ARE so much better off with a product like Mirage.

When choosing an engineered floor, I recommend nothing less than a 1/8" wear/veneer top layer. This will allow for one sanding. The overall thickness does not matter much but the overall construction does. If one has a thin rotary cut veneer over a softwood backer, it will dent and wear out quickly. I prefer a solid sawn face of 3/16" or more over a quality, multi-ply birch ply backer.

Finally, Bruce is all over the map. They make a floor for every budget. Some are good and some are crap. One modest cost product they make that looks pretty good is Natural Reflections. It's a solid, 5/16" strip ( 2.25" wide ) that has nice long lengths, can be nailed or glued, pretty good looking finish, durable because it's solid, comes in many colors, usually less than $4.00 a ft, and it's square edged on sides and butts. I put it in my Dad's house and they love it.

http://www.armstrong.com/flooring/hardw ... -51993.asp

What I ment to be a challenge is to find a decent 3/8" like mirage or equivelant at a 5/16" schon price point.

I enjoyed installing the schon as well as their Virginia engineered. But truthg be told if I were in the market for a new engineered floor I would seriously take a look at this USFloors product. Made in America.

http://www.usfloorsllc.com/products/nav ... ed-floors/

These ppl should pay me for this. lol

Stuff looks good! Reminds me of some European imports. What's the pricing like?

Looks like a great product, I'll have to check it out at Surfaces.
I especially like the section "Why an Oil".

Pricing....if you have to ask.......

Howard, I posted that "Why An Oil" at another forum that finishers go to and the response was not good. lol They don't like it...well they don't like anything other than plastic finishes you know how they are.

I think it's going to take off. Look for more prefinished manufactures to follow suit.

I think it's possibly that some of the finishes have damaged their brain cells over the years, like painters !
Or maybe they just relate to plastic for some odd reason

Is this project limited to prefinished? There are many engineered unfinished products out there with heavy, sawn faces that can be considered "lifetime" floors. Sometimes cost-prohibitive on condo projects with integrated budgets.
There are also mills that do engineered prefin with heavy wear layers. Check out Schafer Flooring's offerings. Beautiful stuff.

I haven't seen a mirage floor in a long time but it used to be excellent material. If I remember correctly, my old boss did a couple of Firebird floors. I could have sworn that the Firebird floors were pre finished as well. At the time, he said they were very expensive . I should research them again to see where pricing is at.

I thought Bruce bought them and were producing it under Bruce's Studio B line for awhile.

Ken may know more about that.

Been to their website lately?