Sunday, February 19, 2006

Factory Floor


At first glance, you might think this is a brick floor but it's not. Occasionally one sees factory floors made of hardwood boards stood on their ends like this. I have no idea why this material is used.

5 comments:

micki said...

Very interesting. You were in this factory for what reason that you were able to make this picture?

Rick Lee said...

Hi Micki... I'm a commercial photographer. I do photography for almost any kind of business you can think of. Often these days I'm working in hospitals... not so much in factories any more but sometimes I do work in factories. I spent two days shooting in this factory a couple of weeks ago.

Paul Worthington said...

For several years I worked in a rocket factory. The entire factory floor was made up of these wooden 'bricks'. They were on end, like the ones in your picture, and covered in a black pitch. If you looked closely, in many bricks you could see the ring patterns of the lumber from which they came.

There were two main reasons why the floors were made of this material: 1) it's softer than cement, so things that are dropped may not incur so much damage as they would on a hard floor, and 2) the relatively cheap wooden bricks could sustain some damage and be replaced extremely easily - dig out the old, lay in the new, re-pitch - much easier to patch and repair than most any other flooring material.

Scott Mitchell said...

Thank you for the insite Paul. I enjoy understanding how things like that work.

Rick Lee said...

That all makes good sense Paul. Thanks for the insight. In the past, I've always thought that these wooden floors were a throwback... only found in very old factories. But lately I've seen them in relatively newer factories too.