The wheelbase of the 1929 Rolls-Royce Springfield Phantom at the Audrain Automobile Museum in Newport, R.I., is a whopping 12 feet. The quartersawn Douglas fir floorboards, though? Longer still. The wide plank boards measure 20 feet long, so large that three of Westwood, Mass.-based C & R Flooring Inc.'s guys were needed to rack one up, says owner Chris Zizza. Not only that, but the fir is a hefty 1½ inches thick to help support the cars. Zizza's crew glued and nailed down 8,000 square feet of the material onto a high-grade OSB subfloor atop a joist system in the museum as the building underwent a renovation in 2014. The floor was finished with a custom cherry mahogany stain to provide a warm counterpoint to the metal vehicles on display. Zizza was thrilled to work on a project of this size and caliber, plus he's a car enthusiast himself. "They treat every car like it's an ancient artifact," he says. "This museum will be here forever, and C & R put the flooring down. Man does it look awesome."
