Quote:
Originally Posted by mrerick
The floors of these machine shops were often formed with a surface of maple wood blocks placed vertically (with the grain running up and down) on top of a reinforced concrete base.
I worked for several years at IBM's factory site in Poughkeepsie, and the floors were built this way. They are remarkably stable.
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End grain flooring is very stable in horizontal orientation, understandable if one recalls that a board will swell and shrink or crush in thickness/width, but not appreciably in length. There is one exception, though. The shop floor in my high school was constructed this way, but fell victim to a leak in the roof. This swelled up the pieces, which had nowhere to go but up, causing a giant hump in the matrix. I don't remember for sure, but I think it calmed down as the material dried out again. But then it would have been loose because the grain is crushed in the vulnerable orientations by the compression and does not recover its full dimension after that.