Reading timber patters - wood for Floor #3

With floor timber patterns ready it was about time to prepare the wood.

First thing I did was to look closely onto annual growth rings pattern to determine best possible usage for my stock. I need not only to build floor #3 but also make laminated frames for repairing these which broke on Meritaten in tight bilge curve. If time and timber permits I’m also planning to make new frames for Glypto, my dinghy.

Having done that I’ve cut the stock into more manageable pieces of 1,5m - this oak is dense thus heavy so ripping it on portable table saw can be challenging at times.

Since my stock is live-edge plank - first I needed to remove bark and sapwood (lighter, less dense wood under the bark, used by the tree to transport water - hence prone to rot). I’ve ripped all planks on table saw and looked again onto what I got.

Apart from a considerable pile of firewood I got some nice material. I could now better determine which part will be used for frames and which goes into floor timber.

One plank has tree’s heart in the middle. I’ve chosen it deliberately because that gives me quarter-sawn timber on both sides of the heart. Central part - with the heart - will have to be cut out as it is unstable and prone to checking. I will make my frames from these quarter-sawn parts.

The second plank is flat-sawn just above the tree heart - here I have a mixed grain since the tree was quite thin. I will use this stock to build my floor #3 - it will be laminated from circa 50mm thick pieces to make the total height.

Ideally floor timber should also be quarter-sawn if it was done from one piece. Very good explanation and guide about choosing wood fibres direction is given by Louis Sauzedde here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzCmES_Lwrs
Screen shot form Louis’ video below shows the ideal annual rings pattern for building floor timber.

Understanding wood grain and how to use it properly - REMORA (Part 5) Louis Sauzedde
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzCmES_Lwrs

Since I don’t have such thick quarter-sawn stock I will build my floor in laminations - just as it was originally on my boat.

To glue oak with epoxy can be a challenge - I hope to dodge it with West system G-Flex epoxy which is specially formulated for gluing oak. Having wood pieces quite thin - 50 mm - should help the glue keeping them together and withstand swelling forces when moisture content will fluctuate. The glue itself allows up to 20% deformation without breaking the bond so it should do the job quite nicely.

Next step now is to split my pattern into 50mm blocks, chose them from available stock, roughly-cut the wood and hand-plane to desired thickness/surface finish.

Since I will be using epoxy, which doesn’t like perfect face matching (gap filling property + glue starvation in too-good joints), I don’t have to make this extremely precise.
Wood-butcher level is enough for this.