By John Alford | Alford’s Custom Hardwood Floors
Sometimes you need to make custom transitions or reducers from one room to another or to other floor coverings. I want to share a safe and easy way to make up to 8” wide transitions. You can do this on a jobsite if you have the tools available or you can do it at your shop.
Most people make them out of 2 1/4”, 3”, or 4” and a lot of times they will rip it on their table saw. In the early part of my career, I did a lot of this, though it never felt safe to me so I wouldn’t let my team do it. For this process, you would raise the blade of your table saw up 3”, where you’re only going to cut maybe 21/2” on an 8-15” bevel. This can be very dangerous. Plus, with this method, you’ll be limited in what you can make.
Instead, you can take a planer to your jobsite if you have a lot of these transitions to make. We actually install a stop block on one side and it needs to be a very straight edge. Often, I’ll make this out of plywood just so it stays nice and straight, but if you’re on the jobsite you can use the material that you are using there.
I have a stop block to be able to put my board against and then I have a riser block on the other side (which is the same thickness as my material) that you can set it on and it will create the bevel across your board. You can vary the bevel across the board by changing
the thickness of the riser block. If I have one board that is ¾” and another is a ½” that I ran one of the reducers through you would see by where the pitch stops there is a difference in the ¾” riser block to the ½” riser block. It changes your angle. If you need the front side ½” thick with a gradual incline, you can change the block underneath it to alter the pitch.
In this example, I will take the ¾” and run it through the planer a couple of times. With a 13” planer, you can typically run about an 8” reducer on it. Anything more than that will require something larger because you need the width of the blocks to be able to clamp them down and for this board not to hit the clamp as you’re running it through.
After about four or five passes, you will see how quickly it started putting the chafer on the board. You do need to hold the side down to make sure it stays flat – at least until you get three or four passes through. Once the planer can put pressure on this flat part, it’ll hold it pretty well. This method is something you easily can do on your own, although it’s great to have more hands.
Another thing I always try to do on these transitions is maintain the groove so you can tongue and groove it into an existing floor. Then, if you need a tongue on the side, you can glue a slip tongue into it and then you have a tongue side.
That’s the easiest and safest way I know to make reducers, and you are able to make some very large format reducers with this approach.
Watch It!
See John Alford complete this process in a video.