Creating a tongue and grove in flooring.

You may recall that I harvested oak trees to make my own white oak flooring for the townhouse that I’m renovating. This has been a long process that involved many steps, the final one being the fabrication of wood flooring from rough wood planks. Part of that process involved putting a tongue and grove on the edges of planks so that they could be attached together.

The fabricator put tongue and groves on the long edges of the boards, but I also wanted to place them on the short edges of the flooring to ensure the tightest possible fit. Commercial flooring has a tongue and grove already placed on the short ends of the planks.

In addition, there are times when two adjacent boards could have two groves instead of a tongue and grove. In such situations I used a spline to join the boards together.

See the photos below.

Using a table-top router to add a grove on the short end of a floorboard.
Using a hand held router to add a tongue on the opposite end of the board. You buy tongue and grove router bits as a set. I found it easier to use two routers as this avoided changing out the bit for each different cut.
Here you can see the tongue and grove that I made using the router bit set.
Normally the tongue and grove fit together nicely.
Sometimes you are faced with having two groves adjacent to each other.
Here you can see the use of a spline piece that connects two planks that have adjacent groves. Splines are commercially made just for this purpose.