Quick Tip: Clamping Deck Boards With An Irwin Mod || Dr Decks

hey guys dr dex here got a quick tip for you this is about laying deck boards and how you space them and keep all your spacing equal and how to compress your deck boards so that you can have nice equal lines in all of your decking when you're installing it so if you like what you see please don't forget to click that subscribe button and hit that bell icon to be notified when we're putting out new content all right so the first thing you need to know is when we are laying a deck board regardless if we're using clips spacers or face screws whatever we're using i always put additional spacers in the decking so what we have here are some deck mate spacers one side is 3 16 of a gap the other side is an eighth inch gap and it says it right here on the spacer eighth inch and three sixteenths these are made by a company called deckmate and these are azac branded or timbertech branded spacers you can pick these up right off the timbertech website so go check them out we have a whole bunch of these we use them all the time it really helps keep our decking in straight lines so basically what you see down here is we're getting towards the end of the deck right and we have already figured out where the deck's going to end we've already figured out how many boards we need to finish and we're getting ready to cinch those boards together to make the end of the deck now i'm going to use this product right here this is called an erwin quick grip i bought these at lowe's home improvement but what's custom about these clamps is they have a deck adapter right on the end of the clamps now you have to buy these separate they come as a separate kit and i think they're called a deck clamp kit i'm not 100 sure they're like eight to twelve dollars if you're paying more than fifteen dollars a set for them you're getting ripped off so don't buy from that type of a web page uh buy it from a reputable tool company that will you know make a little bit of profit on you but not rip your head off i have four of these clamps these are 36 inch erwin clamps these are the heavy duty clamps these are not light duty clamps so i had to make a small modification on my clamps to make these fit because these deck clamps are not or these deck adapters are not designed to fit onto their heavy duty clamps they're designed to fit onto a less expensive cheaper clamp that they make but i was like nope don't like that i want to have girth power when i'm pulling on this thing i want these suckers to cinch so all i had to do is right here and right back here on these two sides of the clamp i took my grinder and i just notched it with an eighth inch grinder bit or grinder wheel and that allowed me to slip these brackets onto these clamps you could use whatever a jigsaw anything you got you just got to cut a little notch into the clamps now when you're spending 60 bucks a piece on the clamps another 10 bucks on these you know these are 70 each so some people can't justify spending you know 280 300 but i tell you what this speeds my action up so much if you're a professional deck builder these come in super handy so i made four sets i'm probably going to end up making a couple more but for now at least we have four when i'm running 20 foot deck i cannot run clamps on every single we do alternate joy space so you need like 10 of them total so we just make do with what we got a couple more come in handy but these are dedicated clamps just for clamping decks together so let me show you how this works you can you can do up to five deck boards at once with one of these because you want to be able to cinch onto one board that's already been installed so we're cortexing this deck right here right so you can see we have three boards that are loose and then i've got all the rest of the boards are screwed in so you could actually set your clamp right into the groove of the board put the other side on the whatever the outside edge of whatever amount of boards you want to clamp and then simply just clamp them together i don't know if you saw that but everything just cinched up now i've got my gapping tools in here so that the boards aren't going to expand they're going to sit here until i chalk these lines and run my screws and then this deck is going to be nice and straight if you have any issue if you have a little bit of wobble or a concave in your deck you can pull this clamp out you can add shims in here instead of instead of these spacers to make a section of the deck fatter if you have to but these clamps work really well they work really well with all different types of spacers and you can get the gap that you desire by just having the right spacers and using these clamps so once again you can kind of see they're loose okay and here we go i'm going to go ahead and clamp it up all right now my deck is nice and tight i'll go through and run four of these clamps we'll chalk some lines and then i'll be able to go ahead and just face screw this thing off and then we'll cortex it later and it'll look beautiful if you look at the rest of this deck all these lines are nice and straight so that's my quick tip for you for today hope you learned something good today from it if you did don't forget to click that subscribe button hit that bell icon to be notified when we're putting out new content and if you like the video like it and also you can hit your comments below and i'll get back to you as soon as i can thank you very much have a great day

Channel: drdecks

Views: 6,180

Rating: 4.9767442 out of 5

Keywords: Dr decks, drdecks, deck building, custom decks, pacific northwest, carpentry, decks, deck, deck board bending, quick tip, irwin, clamps, clamping deck boards

Id: PGoJpt05Nf8

Length: 5min 46sec (346 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 18 2020