Direct stick clamping without nails

Hi,

My wife and I have decided to put in a prefinished solid bamboo floor (yes, I know prefinished is not as flat as postfinished(?), but the bamboo has everything else we want - it's durable, eco-friendly, cheap and looks good). I've decided to do the install myself. I have lots of great info from this site (eg. this thread on clamping), but I have a few questions on details.

1. Securing the floor after clamping. The easiest thing to do i guess is to use mickey pins to fasten the floor to the concrete until the glue sets, but I'm reluctant to nail through the boards, given that they are prefinished and I'll have to live with any holes. Is there any other way of holding the boards?

I've seen youtube videos where they used masking tape to hold the boards together, but this doesn't seem that strong, and they didn't tension the floor in this video (!).

2. Hallways, to tension with wedges takes a bit of space, so what do you do in a hallway that's only 1000mm wide? Tension 2/3 of the width then just use a mallet to get the last few tight?

3. Re-sealing cut boards. What do you use? How long do you have to wait before you can then lay the board?

Any advice greatly appreciated. Special thanks already to people like glock, dusty, larry who have already posted so much useful info.

Tom


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