The soft pine flooring used on our stage had started splintering, thanks to a combination of several years’ misuse and an unfortunate decline in the quality of flooring materials. Our floor surface is one-inch pine T&G approximately 3′ wide laid over two layers of ½′ plywood. The floor surface itself is so soft that overloaded wagons often leave temporary tracks in the surface. Splintering, which results from toenailing into the floor and from the repeated compression and decompression of wood fibers, usually affects shallow-grained boards.

FIGURE 1: SECTION OF BONDO® REPAIR

Most of the floor-patching compounds we tried on the splintered areas became very brittle and soon broke out of the patched area under heavy wagon traffic. A fiberglass boat-hull repair compound worked fairly well but was very expensive. Bondo® autobody filler, on the other hand, flexes with the wood, is easy to mix and apply, and hardens quickly. Its only drawback as a patch is its tendency to crack around the edges, where it is feathered thin by sanding.

Dadoing the area to be patched to a uniform depth and then undercutting the edge with a dovetail router solves this last problem. As the illustration shows, in larger areas we cut a second, deeper, dado into the flooring to serve as an anchor.