Your Own Bamboo Flooring for Dummies - The Freelance Files MMCCV

bamboo flooring

Among the most doofus of all the many, many doofus posts at the mother lode of misinformation (eHow.com) were the ones where an anonymous seventh-grader asked a question about a complex manufacturing processes and some liberal arts graduate "contributor" to the site pretended to answer that question. One of our nominations for Dumbass of the Decade was hot tub salesman Janos Gal, who seemed to think homeowners could harvest lumber from their yards to make flooring. We kid you not... Well, Gal wasn't alone in his dumbassery: meet Wendy Reynolds, who tried to tell her readers "How to Make Bamboo Wood Floors" for HomeSteady.com.

Reynolds managed to find a (now-defunct) flooring company that had shared a cartoon diagram of the process of manufacturing bamboo flooring, along with some advertising copy that Wendy happily included. We'll be simple and straightforward: it would be impossible to follow Reynolds' instructions without an industrial facility... unless you were making flowing for a dollhouse, perhaps. Let's have a look at some of Wendy's... problems:

• "Harvest the bamboo shoots once mature" – Riiiight: everybody has a field of bamboo sufficient for processing.
• "Put the harvested shoots through a splitting and sizing machine. This insures the shoots are crosscut to identical lengths." – Chuckle: Wendy's readers are going to spend tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands on a "splitting and sizing machine"? And Wendy doesn't even realize that "splitting" has nothing to do with "identical lengths"!
• "Remove the outer knots and peel away the skin of each plank" – Ummm, just how do you do this, anyway? Oh, and it's not a "plank" yet, either.
• "Boil the bamboo planks in water rich with preservatives" – Just what "preservatives" is this water "rich with"? And shouldn't that be "rich in"?
• "Allow the bamboo planks to air dry, and then kiln dry to an eight to 14 percent moisture level. " – Ugh: now you gotta build a kiln.
• "Place each bamboo plank on top of a veneer plank, and laminate them together. A two-dimensional hot press machine is required for this step." – Dayumn: another expensive machine. Oh, and Wendy? The bamboo you see is a veneer, and you're MAKING a "plank."
• "Sand the bamboo planks to make the surfaces smooth and level." – Just so's you know, Wendy, this process does not make the plans "level." That comes when they're installed... we hope.

We note that Wendy had nothing whatsoever to say about edges, but we've observed that most manufactured flooring is configured with tongue-and-groove edges and ends. Maybe she'd never seen any flooring up close...

Whatever the case, it should be obvious by now that Reynolds was talking about an industrial process as if you make your own bamboo flooring in your basement with an easy-bake oven and a bathtub. You can't. That, in our humble opinion, means that Wendy is eminently qualified to receive the Dumbass of the Day award. It can go right next to her "communications" BA on her bookshelf.

By the way, we had to ask: did Wendy ever wonder whether the OQ wanted to know how to lay a bamboo floor instead of manufacture one?

DD - FLOORS