hi I'm Tim Gipson I'm going to talk to
you about how to cut laminate wood
flooring now the reason we have to cut
the laminate wood flooring is that as
we're laying it down the wood comes in
varying lengths and we want to make sure
we keep a good staggered pattern as
we're laying that down and then as you
get to the edges we always need to leave
at least of about 3/8 of an inch gap
around the edge between the edge of the
laminate floor and the wall and the
reason we do that is that laminate wood
flooring or any kind of wood flooring
will expand and contract as moisture and
temperature changes in the room so if
you don't allow for any space it can
buckle up against the wall and cause
cracks splintering or buckling in your
floor so when we do get to those end of
our runs and what we will do is we will
find our dimension between the end of
the last piece and the wall and we're
going to deduct 3/8 of an inch so if we
came up with a dimension that was 13 and
5/8 then what we would do is we'd find
our 13 and 5/8 mark on the wood which is
here and then we would deduct one two
three eighths in order to account for
the space I need between the wall and I
will put a mark now the easiest way to
cut it is to use a chop saw such as this
now when we do cut and measure the one
thing that we've got to make sure is
that one end of the laminate flooring
will have a tab such as this and the
other end will have a slot so you always
want to make sure that you've got it
oriented so that if you have a tab on
the flooring end then we need the slot
end on this end so we don't want to cut
this in we want to cut the end
with the tab or in other words the we
want to cut the same end as the end we
are measuring from on the floor now we
can either draw the line and get this
lined up or if you have the saw that has
the laser guide built into it then all
we need to do is start the saw then line
up the pencil mark on the laser line and
make our cut and it's always important
to make sure that you have safety
glasses to protect your eyes whenever
you're using any kind of a power tool so
here we go we'll demonstrate now the
chop saw make sure that you have a nice
consistent 90 degree angle and then the
space that is left between this and the
wall will be covered up by a corner
round or base you molding later so again
as you can see when we cut this we end
up with a solid piece so we've got to
make sure that the piece on the floor
has the tab so that will fit right in
place and then we can either glue or
nail it in place depending on our
application so I'm Tim Gipson with how
to cut laminate wood flooring