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A Hardwood Floor Where You Can Actually Remove One Piece at a Time

Steller Floors' innovative trick

By Rain Noe - January 7

in Interior Design

Standard hardwood flooring features a tongue-and-groove arrangement to lock each piece into place. However, the interlocking set-up means that should you need to remove a damaged piece, or access the subfloor for some maintenance reason, you must take up the entire floor until you reach the relevant piece.

A Pennsylvania-based company called Steller Floors has developed an alternative to the tongue and groove. At first blush, the company's logo seems a strange one for a flooring company…

…until you realize it represents their innovation: An extruded plastic spline.

By 3D-printing a plank that would snap neatly into the spline, the company worked out the right profile they'd use to cut into hardwood.

Their resultant flooring product can easily be laid by a DIY'er. To firm each piece up, you simply step on it with your foot.

And should you ever need to remove a piece, you can pull up just that piece, using a suction cup.

You can also install these herringbone-style.

And now for the sticker shock: Their least-expensive option is a 5/8" thick Oak at $10/foot. (I assume that the cost of the splines is in there.) If you want to step up to 3/4" Oak, it's $11/foot. More exotic species (Walnut, Hickory, etc.) are $20/foot. Innovation doesn't come cheap.

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Kyle Wolfe

a day ago

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I love the idea but imagine the expense comes from milling. It doesn't look like an easy milling profile (certainly not a simple rotary bit) To keep costs down, a custom spline could be used and a router bit could be provided to make any solid flooring work. I can imagine a few profiles that would work well. You'd have to redesign the clip but the concept is pretty nice. Having a floating floor I'd love the ability to access underneath or replace a board that got damaged without it being a fullday event.

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- Bruce Schrock
  
  Kyle Wolfe
  
  10 hours ago
  
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  The manufacturing challenges looks fun to figure out. My guess is they're using a custom built molder to machine the negative profiles, That's how I would go anyway. They must have an economical system because their sq ft price is at industry average.
  
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Ryan Cee

a day ago

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A person who can afford this will just buy standard flooring because they can afford to pay for the expense of ripping up/modifying it. Innovation includes externalities like cost, or it's not innovation.

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