I put in my first floor last week. I decided for a number of reasons that I didn't want to place the board tight, but rather would prefer a space of say 1/16 or 1/8. I first started using plastic tiling spacers, but quicky found out that when I tried removing them, the boards had gotten so tight from the air nailer than the stem just stayed in place when the top ripped off, when removing them. Then I tried pennies. The problem was that again the nailer caused the penny to be so tight in the gap that I had to use a pair of pliers to remove them, which caused blemishes on the wood. Then I decided to just leave random size gaps, but I found that it was hard keeping the floor straight across 10 feet of random gaps. Is there any product made to use as a spacer in wood floors?

You can buy spacers at a flooring supply house or I think the big box stores carry them also.

what are they called? I just went to Lumber Liquidator's site and searched on spacer and spacers without any luck. No one at the big stores know what I am talking about?

On the LL site they are in the Laminate installation kit(the yellow things in the package).


These spacers about half way down the page are the cats meow.

http://www.craintools.com/fs-laminatetools.html

They want gapes between each board, not talking about perimeter expansion.

richb2,

We use 1/4-20 flat washers to make expansion gaps. Washers pull out without as much damage as a penny can cause to the edge of the wood. Do not leave them in over night.

Take a look at page #10 at this link.

http://www.nofma.com/Portals/0/Publicat ... Floors.pdf

My bad, reread makes more sense.