None.
This invention was not federally sponsored.
This invention relates to the field of joining together pieces of precut wood, laminate, plastic or composite material of even widths using grooves in the back of each piece to create a solid panel, such as a floor, side panel, decorative room divider or ceiling panel, of the individual pieces of wood. A preferred embodiment of this invention relates to the general field of hardwood flooring, and a means by which the individual flooring planks can be mechanically joined together to create a floating floor.
More specifically, the invention comprises a strip of metal, plastic, or other suitable material used on the underside of three or more contiguous pieces of hardwood flooring to hold the piece together, where the hardwood flooring has a complementary groove cut into each piece to serve as an anchor point for the strip. In the preferred embodiment, the strip functions as a physical means of removable attachment, without the use of glue, nails, screws or other, more or less permanent means of attachment. The strip has a central guide and terminal fasteners at either end of the strip which can be removable snapped into the grooves on the hardwood, and is slightly bent in between the central guide and the terminal fasteners, such that when the user steps down upon a series of hardwood planks into which the guide and terminal grips have been attached, the entire flooring unit snaps into place. The strip can be made to fit into as few as three contiguous pieces of hardwood planks, or can be made in a number of different iterations, including lengthy strips with numerous central guides and two terminal grips, or a central guide and two terminal grips located two or more board lengths from the central guide, thereby allowing one strip to secure more than three boards together. By cross linking and bridging various sections of flooring, the user of the invention can build and entire “floating” floor, which does not require any glue, nails, screws or other, more permanent means of attachment to hold to individual hardwood planks together or to hold the hardwood floor to the base slab upon which it sits.
The preferred embodiment of this invention is a flat strip which rests of a subfloor and three or more floorboards, with each floorboard being held by the flat strip having a complementary groove cut in its bottom which will hold the fastening portions of the flooring strip. There are, however, several other possible uses for the invention, including wall panels, decorative room dividers, and roof slabs, so all references to the flat strip and board upon which the flat strip is used are intended to apply to the general field of building boards used to create large areas where individual boards are combined together.
The inherent beauty of wood as a flooring material has been well known and respected for centuries. Many of the early historic buildings had wooden floors made from oak or other hardwood planks often several inches thick. These floors held up very well to heavy use and, indeed, the floors in many historic buildings throughout the world are the original ones put in sometimes 1,000 years ago. As humans multiplied and forests shrunk, eventually it became necessary and desirable to use thinner and thinner pieces of wood. Within the last hundred years, the idea of constructing hardwood, laminate, and imitation materials in preconstructed units with fixed widths and a variety of lengths, such that a user could put together a floor.
Traditionally, such floors are attached directly to the underlying slab or wood subfloor, usually through use of glue, nails, or screws. Such a means of attachment, while adequately adhering the individual floor planks to the underlying surface creates the real danger of cosmetic defects in the construction as it is very difficult to maintain the necessary pressure in both a width sense and a length sense to keep each board butted up against the boards surrounding it on all three sides. As a result, cracks often appeared after the user had already affixed boards in place, thereby creating an unsightly crack which is extremely difficult to cosmetically cover and nearly impossible to fix.
The use of individual boards cut with a set width and of varying lengths to create a large area of wood, for example a hardwood board joined to either the subfloor or other boards is well known in the art. The prior art also shows a number of individual floorboards or “building boards” with “tongues” and “grooves” or other complementary surface configurations which mate together in a relatively seamless fashion. The use of glue, nails or screws to attach individual floorboards to the subfloor has been practiced for several hundred years. There are also a number of commercially established brands, such as Pergo®, which provide laminate, composite, or imitation wood surfaced planks which snap together to form a floor which can be either attached to the subfloor through glue or other means, or left “floating” above the subfloor, through means of an advanced design of the tongue and groove elements such that they snap together in a more or less permanent manner.
Because wood tends to expand and contract with changes in temperature and relative humidity, the current trend in flooring is to create floating floors which expand and contract as a unit, as opposed to the method of attaching individual planks of the floor to the subfloor, which can more easily lead to cracks appearing as the wood expands and contracts over the seasons. Thus, it is advantageous to provide a device by which individual planks can be attached to like pieces without requiring the individual planks to be adhered to the subfloor.
The prior art also discloses the use of flooring strips to lock floorboards together. For example, WO 94/26999 discusses the use of a flooring strip mechanical join floorboards. In this patent, a mechanical connection between the “tongue” of one floorboard and the “groove” of another allows for a mutual vertical locking of the joint edges, and between the leading edge, shaped like a tongue, and the trailer edge of another board, shaped like a groove, allows for both “horizontal” and “vertical” adhesion and stability. This patent, along with its predecessors in this particular line of inventions, has a strip with a locking element which is basically a dovetailed gripping stub that adheres to one plank with end which wrap around a cut roughly trapezoidal shape on the bottom, and have a gripping or locking element which is extended to a locking groove on an adjacent board. Because the tolerances are small but not zero, the strip allows the boards to be adjusted and attached to one another easily.
The prior art does not, however, disclose a device by which more than two contiguous planks can be joined together, not does it present a mechanism by which an entire floor (or wall section, decorative panel, or ceiling) can be laid using a series of single elements capable of mechanical joining of like planks. These advances in the art would be useful as they would save time and resources, as well as creating a floating floor which truly expands and contract as a unit, thereby further reducing the likelihood of cracks appearing in between the individual flooring planks. Thus there has existed a long-felt need for a means to join three or more floorboards, which is simple, easy to use, inexpensive to create, and takes less time than currently available methods.
The current invention provides just such a solution by providing a piece of flooring (or panel building block, ceiling plank, or wall pieces) that is manufactured with a groove cut in the bottom where the groove is located in a suitable location for a flat strip with, at a minimum, a central guide and two terminal fasteners which fit into the complementary grooves and hold, at a minimum, three pieces of the flooring together. The strip can be made of a metal such as aluminum, stainless steel, a strong plastic, or other suitable material which can either be bent or crimped to create the central guide(s) and the terminal fasteners, or allow for the riveting, gluing or attachment by other means of the central guide(s) and terminal fasteners to the flat strip. In is simplest iteration, the flat strip is wide enough to connect three contiguous planks of flooring, and by cross-linking and bridging over to other pieces of flooring, and entire floating floor can be created without the need for any complicated tongue and groove locking elements.
While the basic concept of flat strip describes a central guide which fits into the groove in the middle plank and two terminal fasteners which fit into grooves on the adjacent planks, it is other iterations of this basic idea which produce the most effective savings in terms of time and money. Another version of the invention includes lengthy strips with numerous central guides and two terminal grips, or a central guide and two terminal grips located two or more board lengths from the central guide, thereby allowing one strip to secure more than three boards together. By utilizing longer flat strips, it is possible to create a floating floor using fewer flat strips as each flat strip can join (and cross-link and bridge) more individual planks. Indeed, it is possible to manufacture entire rolls of strips with central guides and terminal fasteners such that a user can lay out a series of strips from one wall to another several feet apart from each and quickly work from one corner of the room to another by laying down individual planks on the pre-laid strips of fastener devices. Another version of the invention calls for individual strips or rolls of strips which can be laid diagonally across a subfloor, thereby providing both “horizontal” and “vertical” means of attachment and adhesion to the individual planks. A final version of the invention describes the use of hook and loop fasteners, where a line of one element, say, hook, is laid either in strip form or sheet form across the subfloor, and each plank has loop elements attached to its bottom, such that each individual plank is attached to the hook at its proper position.
With respect to the material from which the strips are made, it is envisioned that metal would provide a strong and durable flooring strip. Plastic, however, is preferred because of its lighter weight and relatively inexpensive cost, both in terms of purchasing the raw materials and due to the fact that plastic can be poured into a mold to achieve the desired shape while metal must be bent, either by hand or mechanically through a crimping machine.
It is a principal object of the invention to provide a superior means by which floorboards and other building boards can be connected to one another without the need for glue, nails or screws.
It is also a principal object of the invention to provide a superior building plank which requires only a simple groove cut in its bottom for each individual plank to be attached to other building planks.
A further principal object of the invention is to provide a superior flat strip to join individual building planks together.
Another principal object of the invention is provide a means by which a well connected floating floor can be constructed in a fast and inexpensive manner from individual building planks without the need for complex tongue and groove joining designs.
Additional objects of the invention include:
It is a final object of this invention to provide a building block and flat strip which can be used to connect individual building blocks into a floating floor which is inexpensive, easy to use, easy to remove, and creates an aesthetically pleasing finished product.
It should be understood the while the preferred embodiments of the invention are described in some detail herein, the present disclosure is made by way of example only and that variations and changes thereto are possible without departing from the subject matter coming within the scope of the following claims, and a reasonable equivalency thereof, which claims I regard as my invention.
This bend is crucial to the effective binding of three pieces of hardwood flooring together by this iteration of the invention's flooring strip. As the user attaches the flooring strip to the back of three grooved planks (shown in other figures), he/she slides the central guide (1) and the terminal fasteners (2) into the respective grooves on the underside of the three planks. The flooring strips shown in
By putting pressure on the top of the hardwood planks, for example by pounding with a rubber mallet or stepping upon the hardwood, the bend flattens out slightly, pushes the central guide to penetrate the groove in the bottom of the middle board, and causes the inward curvature (3) and chisel point (4) to align such that they penetrate the grooves on the outer two boards. When the pressure is removed, the bend attempts to “snap back”, thereby creating pulling actions in from both terminal fasteners. As the inward curvature and chisel point of the terminal fasteners has already penetrated the groove as deeply as the height of the terminal fastener will allow, the change in angle caused as the bend attempts to reform causing the chisel point (4) to dig into the side of the groove, thereby establishing a strong grip on the two outside planks. As the bend attempts to return to its “resting position” it pulls the two end boards in upon the middle board, thereby creating a tightly bound group of three planks. Bridging between groups of three boards is how the floating floor is created using this iteration of the invention. There are advantages and disadvantages to the use of metal or plastic flooring strips, in that a metal flooring strip can be thinner than a plastic strip that provides the same amount of pulling force, and yet plastic will be more economical to make and will not rust in the event that water seeps through the floor onto the flooring strip.
It should be noted that although the preferred embodiment of this invention is a flooring strip where the central guide and terminal fasteners are bent and crimped to align at a perpendicular angle to the rest of the flooring strip, an alternative iteration for this and the different variations of the invention listed below in which the upright protuberances—namely, the central guide (or central guides as described below) and terminal fasteners—extend upward in a direction approximately 45 degrees to the right or left from the direction of the flooring strip. This iteration creates a flooring strip which can be laid on a floor diagonally to the direction of the planks, thereby creating a floor with different forces of attachment.
Each hardwood plank, generally referred to by 24) has a tongue end (20) and a groove end (21). Hardwood floors are created by laying hardwood planks such that the tongue end (20) of one piece is inserted into the groove end (21) of another piece. When the pressure is taken off the bend, the two outer planks are pulled in against the middle plank, thereby creating a very tight fit between the tongue and groove (23).