Engineered Wood Floors
The bellow diagram shows the typical construction of a 14mm engineered wood floors
This range of flooring has a 3 layered construction. A solid wood top layer, a core layer made up of strips of wood and single piece stabilizing base layer. These products are available in both a 15mm format and a 20mm format with 3.5mm and 4.5mm wear layers respectively. The boards are tongue and grooved all round and have micro bevels on the long sides only.
Engineered wood floors can be nailed (20mm only), glued down or floated.
Multifloor or Semi Solid Wooden Flooring
This range of flooring has a 2 layered construction. A 5-6mm top layer of solid wood and a base layer of 15mm plywood. The boards are tongue and grooved all round and have micro bevels on the long sides only.
Multifloor products can be fitted as nailed down floors where the subloor is either existing floor boards or plywood or they can be glued down to screeds or chipboard using an appropriate parkett adhesive. We would always recommend using MS Polymer adhesive.
Multifloor products, in our opinion, are not suitable for a floating installation. The tongue and groove on these boards is not sufficiently well engineered to support a floating installation. If you want to float a floor please choose the engineered products.
Solid Wooden Flooring
Solid wooden flooring is a single piece of hardwood or softwood top to bottom. The boards are tongued and grooved all round and will have micro bevels on the long sides if they are supplied pre finished. Otherwise they will be square edged boards which will need to be sanded and finished on site.
The best way to fit a solid wooden flooring is by secret nailing and according to British Standards by surface fixing if the boards are over 130mm wide. Nailing should always be the preferred method of fixing but when necessary you could also glue down a solid hardwood floor. Solid floors cannot be floated, there is too much movement in a solid floor and the machining of the tongue and groove does not support this type of installation.