"Jimbo" wrote in message
oups.com...
On Feb 16, 10:49 am, Karl S wrote:
On Thu, 15 Feb 2007 18:47:08 -0500, goaway wrote:
I have bamboo floors, very nice to look at for a SHORT WHILE !!!!!!!!
Bamboo is VERY soft it dents faster than pine. If anybody wants to use
this
material I would restrict it's use to bedroom floors. In my dining room
and
kitchen it is a complete and total disaster. For a simple check, take a
sample of what you what as a floor. Then drop a plier on it from waist
hieght. This does a close aproximation of a "normal" female in spike
heels.
Aslo the sliding action of chairs, either on rollers( Nice ruts) or
standard
chairs, as they are pushed back by a typical 200 lbs male, again nice
ruts
in the floor.

I could have written this about my bamboo floor.

Mine is a floating product from Ikea called Kvist. Not only is it soft
(snip)
Ikea don't do bamboo floors. They do laminates with a bamboo
pattern.

Bamboo itself is medium hard. It comes in at 1642 on the Janka
hardness scale. At one end of the scale is Douglas Fir which comes in
at 660 and, at the other, the extremely hard and expensive Brazilian
Walnut at 3800. Bamboo is harder than red or white oak or hard maple.

As I reported in a previous post, bamboo isn't the best flooring material. I
have 'engineered' bamboo, 'toasted'. This comes in on the Janka scale around
1200 pounds, not psi. The rest of the 'engineering' consists of two crossed
plantation pine layers, whatever plantation pine is. The bamboo is 1/8"
thick, the whole assembly is 9/16" thick. The Janka test could only have
been proposed by people not interested in informing the public of the
hardness of materials. The test imbeds a .444" dia steel ball into the
material being tested. When the ball penetrates .222", the force in pounds
needed is the Janka hardness...

Look elsewhere for flooring material for areas with moderate to heavy
traffic.

Tin Woodsmn