|
Posted to uk.d-i-y
|
|
|
Uneven floor/skirting and kickboards
wrote:
On 10/09/2019 05:41, wrote:
I've just spent half a day ****ing around with the router to get a 3m
length of kitchen unit kickboard fitting reasonably tidily on a quite
uneven floor. The floor doesn't look that uneven, but when you put a
long, straight edge on it, lumps and hollows everywhere. The unmolested
board was touching floor at each end and floating in air in the middle.
Trimming the ends, the touch points of the kickboard moved to various
points along its length; trim those and same again.
So, my question is: is there a better way to do it than rough
measurements, followed by many iterations of fine adjustment, to get
best fit? Against a hard surface (which this was), a kickboard or
skirting board with completely faithful reproduction of the contours of
the floor can look naff, drawing the eye to the unevenness. The trick
seems to be to go some way to accommodating the ups and downs, but
accepting that gaps between floor and board might be unavoidable for
best overall appearance.
I'm aware of bendy profile strips that can be used to reproduce uneven
surfaces, but I don't think that one of these would have helped over a
3m length.
What do pros do?
Thanks.
Bill.
It's called "scribing". Put the timber in place, propped in places if
necessary, then find a small spacer that's the size of the smallest gap.
Rest a pencil on the top of the spacer and run the spacer along the
floor so that the pencil draws the floor profile on the wood, then cut
with whatever is must appropriate (jigsaw, sander, rasp, surform,
scraper) to the line. It might take a couple of iterations but it's
possible to get a near-perfect fit if needed. If appropriate, it can be
made slightly easier to fine-tune if you put a bevel on the edge so that
only a narrow strip at the front of the wood is against the floor.
I treated myself to a Trend Easyscribe, but with care a compass will do
the same job, as will a washer.
How do you do that with a kickboard that won't fit under the kitchen
units uncut, when the floor in front of the units bears little relation
to the floor a couple of inches further back? The only way I can think
of is to use a narrower board temporarily screwed in place parallel to
the kitchen units above and transfer the marks with another scribing
process. The reason I ask is that I am just about to do this job.
--
Roger Hayter
|