As I stated earlier, we have also installed our hardwood and bamboo flooring for basketball in some of the more traditional ways than our clip system. Of course, you’re likely wondering “why we would use anything other than a clip system?”.
Well, sometimes it’s specified by the architect or the client and other times, the environment mandates it. On a large floor, where humidity may be an issue, it’s better to nail a floor down, that has expansion gaps spaced throughout the floor than to allow the floor to only expand around the outside as it does with the clip system.
These days the most commonly used types of subfloor systems are the padded plywood systems or the sleeper systems. Both require a little explanation….
Padded plywood
The face of this is composed of our pre-finished flooring boards, which are then nailed to two layers of plywood below, typically ½” each. The plywood deck then floats on a number of rubber pads that provide the resilience to the floor. The pads come in any number of configurations but the type that we manufacture are made of recycled rubber and are cut in such a way to provide extremely low vibration of the finished floor.
Sleeper floors
Ag
ain, the finished boards are on the top and these are then nailed to 3” x 2” strips of wood, as pictured to the left. These run the entire length of the floor, and are referred to as sleepers. On the bottom of the sleepers, there are rubber pads which provide the shock absorption of the flooring. Here again, we used recycled pads.
The sleeper floor is not as popular as it used to be and more floors today are using some type of padded plywood system. As I said in my previous entry there are a dizzying array of constructions offered by the maple flooring manufacturers, but many are one of these two types, or a combination of the two types.
Our flooring performs well over either type of construction. We do add the additional benefit of being able to skip the whole sanding and finishing part of the process, which can save an immense amount of time and inconvenience to the facility. All of our these constructions have been tested by us and have been shown to meet or exceed DIN Standards for basketball.