Building a Dance Floor
by Jim Watson – Mid-Ohio Boogie Club
The Mid-Ohio Boogie Club decided to continue holding an ABA weekend dance event in Columbus, Ohio. However, we needed a dance floor. The outstanding dance floor used for the five “Beat The Heat” events would not be available for the “Mid-Ohio Boogie Bash”.
The first question we needed to answer was; does the club rent or build a dance floor. Since the team that put on the “Beat The Heat” events and built the dance was available plus we still had a free place to store the floor, the decision was to build.
End that tightens the cable
Cable holding 1x2
The first step was design. We considered several alternatives, however we decided to go with a cable system again. THe original design had several problems, so we decided to make a couple of prototypes to test our design. This included cutting 1x2 foot plywood pieces to simulate 4x8 plywood sheets.
The other new aspect of the floor is the use of foam blocks (blue in the pictures) instead of solid plywood blocks. We obtained 130 sheets of plywood and 35 sheets of foam for the floor.
Cutting the foam to length
Routing the groove
Gluing the foam
Nailing brads
The first step was to cut the foam to length and then using a band saw we cut it to a 2” width. The next step was to cut a groove in the edge of the 4x8 plywood sheets using routers with slot cutting bits.
Next the boards had the foam glued in place. We quickly found out that the foam would slide around when we stacked the boards on top of each other. Although we did not want to use any fasteners in the foam, we decided to use 1” brads to keep the foam from sliding.
Once the grooves were cut and the foam was glued to the boards, we allowed them dry for a week.
Standing Boards to Dry
Applying Sealer/Finish
Next came the task of applying the sealer/finish to both sides of the boards to keep them from warping.
Well, this is where we are at for now. I will continue the article in the next the September edition of the ABA news. Feel free to come to the “Mid-Ohio Boogie Bash” the second weekend in August to try out our new dance floor.