How To Make Your Deck Sturdy With V-Bracing || Dr Decks

[Music] hey guys dr dex here today i want to show you how to sturdy up a deck if you have a deck that's wobbling and it feels like it's moving back and forth it probably is we're going to add some bracing to this deck called v bracing and it's my favorite way to sturdy up a deck because it always works and it always locks it in real nice and tight so if you like what you see today you learned a little something about how to sturdy up a deck don't forget to hit that subscribe button and that bell icon to be notified when we're putting out fresh content all right so the the thought is i have this really massive deck that's very high off the ground i'm locked up against the house which is great but i'm 15 feet away from the house over here and the deck wants to do this now there's no decking installed on this deck yet it's just joyous two posts and a massive beam so what we need to do is we want to eliminate as much sway as we possibly can out of this deck so what i'm gonna do is if my joists were heading straight towards you like this and have a beam here and a beam out here i'm going to add a v brace on a 45 degree angle from the center point of the house this way to lock these joists in place and to lock the beam in place and to keep the deck from doing this what you have to do is you have to use a piece of 2x6 pressure treated and i'm using 20 footers to try and get a 15 foot span or again i need a 20 foot span i got a 15 foot depth it's 14 feet in between beams so i'm hoping a 20 footer will work i may be a little off of a 45 degree angle because what we're going to do is we're going to create a template and we're going to mark it and then i'll bring it down and cut it and then i'll come back up and install it this is a really great way for you to eliminate sway also to make this code compliant we have to use two four inch construction legs at each joist intersection of our v brace to our joists so every 16 well we're about 14 inches on center so every 14 inches laterally but we're going diagonally on a 45 so it's going to be more like every i don't know 18 inches to 24 inches we're gonna have two construction legs four inch and we're using fast and master timber locks to install this we're not just using ordinary everyday screws those will break in an earthquake we want something that has structure that's designed to withhold and withstand loads and fasten master makes great products for that you could also use their ledger locks if you wanted today i'm probably just going to use their timberlocks has to be a four inch so we're using a four inch timberlock should do the job just fine this is what we normally use and this really will sturdy up this deck so let's check it out so we're gonna put this under here we're gonna clamp it and then i'm gonna see how square or how much of a 45 we have you can't go out anymore though can you because it'll it'll be too short all right so now we've traced our board now if we wanted to put this on a true 45 degree angle this board would not be good enough so what we did was we maxed out the 20 footer to see what it would look like and what angle we'd actually end up with so we drew a line and when i check it i'm at a 44 degree angle instead of a 45 degree angle so that's acceptable for me it gets us the maximum amount of length out of this board and allows us to really still lock this baby in the way i want to so i'm going to go ahead and cut these at a 44. then i'm going to find another my other board i'm going to trace it and cut it out as well so i have two matching pieces that are exactly the same length and then i'll be able to g-tape those and then be able to install them all right so we know the length of both of our boards for our v bracing we go ahead and put a little bit of g-tape on top because once we add this to the top this deck is does not have a waterproof bladder system so it's going to get wet so if moisture's sitting on top of this board all the time it's just going to rot so even though it's pressure treated so we put a little bit of tape on top of it it's not sticking real good but that's okay once it dries out it will start to stick i'm going to go ahead and get these ready to go and we're going to start installing them with our four inch fasten master timber locks and we use like i said two per joist and we're going to go ahead and start installing these v braces and then we'll do a double check and see how sturdy this deck becomes okay he's got to come towards you a little bit all right so now we have our board temporarily clamped in place it looks good i'm happy with the placement and so now i'm gonna double up on every joist two four inch construction fasteners we already have all of our joists laid out and spaced properly so i can go ahead and do this and know that everything else is going to fit just right so here we go all right guys there you go that v bracing that you see up there will now eliminate the sway and the wobble that we were getting uh earlier in the deck it's amazing how tight that becomes so thanks for watching if you like what you saw don't forget to click that subscribe button hit that bell icon to be notified when we're putting out fresh content don't forget to like our videos and share them with all your friends thanks for watching have a great day

Channel: drdecks

Views: 13,490

Rating: 4.9747634 out of 5

Keywords: Dr decks, drdecks, deck building, custom decks, pacific northwest, carpentry, decks, deck, deck board bending

Id: ne1olZHI66E

Length: 6min 13sec (373 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 04 2020