Tongue and Groove Floor board Removal

UPDATE 5 August 2018 - Cleaning and Grading boards
Tools I made to do the job with relative ease and minimise damage to the boards.

CLEANING AND GRADING UPDATE.
Cleaning the grooves and Tongue.
I found that if the boards had been re-lacquered after contraction and gaps appearing , the lacquer had flowed down into the gaps mixing with the sand and dust etc that had accumulated over time resulting in a very hard residue. After exploring various tools to scrape the hard mix out without damaging the board I eventually found out that with using a heat gun to warm the hardened mix I could scrape it off cleanly and with ease and without damaging the board or the tongue or groove very quickly. I helps if one person manages and moves the gun while another comes behind and scrapes
The scraper I used is listed below
http://www.unipro.com.au/products/han...

Grading
I made the mistake of not grading my boards by width prior to getting a pro to re-install. It is important to grade and group the boards by:
1- The height of the material above the tongue. - avoid excessive sanding due to neighbouring boards having different heights.
2- measure the width of each board at intervals and label them - laying boards of the same width end to end with each run ensures that you minimise the gaps between neighbouring boards on the finished job. I found my boards had widths from 130 to 133 mm with the result that failing to do as suggested above resulted in my having gaps in the end.
The layers don't have time to select boards or may be unwilling.
Hope that helps