Tutorial: Surface Boarders || Dr Decks

hey guys dr dex here today i want to talk to you a little bit about surface borders why we do them and how we do them and what's the reason for so many surface borders doctor please enlighten me okay sounds good to me and i will so if you like this video don't forget to hit that subscribe button hit that bell icon to be notified when we're putting out new content as well so surface borders are really just a way to define the either perimeter or the center section of a deck most of the time a lot of our surface borders are straight but lately over the last i'd say 10 years i've been going a little deeper and creating a lot of curves and doing curved surface borders right in the middle of a deck just because i think that it's a cool way to break the direction of a deck or the lines of a deck without having to create a bunch of seams in the deck that are unintentional i don't like to run random patterns too much i really instead like to run full length boards wherever i can on a deck and if it's over a certain length and i can't make a board fit then i have to intentionally break it somehow when you use a service border you're creating a framework underneath that border to accept it so with by creating the framework the way you want to you're usually going to create a better healthy version of the deck by making it more robust where all these boards are coming together not only do your field boards have to be supported but so does your surface border now when you're doing straight surface borders you can do a couple different methods of installation mostly i call them a ladder where you're just creating joists going the opposite direction to hold that board if you have all your decking running this way but your surface borders going this way then your joists are going to be going this way for the deck board this way but they got to change up the this for this direction when you're trying to run a board this way so your joists run this way here but then they run this way here so when you're running two different directions you actually have to create it's a little bit more work or actually can be a lot more work especially when you start doing them on curves because when we do surface borders on curves we install a lot of flat blocking so when we install a lot of flat blocking that's on a curve that's where it gets complicated especially when you do a wide set like we did here where we added a five and a half inch board and a three and a half inch board to create a nine inch wide opening that we had to create support not only for that nine inches but also an inch and a half on each side of that nine inches so if you had nine and a half or nine inches and an inch and a half an inch and a half you need 12 inches wide minimum but when you're going on a curve you want to have a little bit of cushion in there so that you can make sure that all your field boards get locked down and all of your surface borders get locked down and i like to use solid blocking because that way my curve boards have been modified with heat and they might have a little bit of highs and lows and i want to be able to put screws down anywhere i want along that run every 12 inches if i want every six inches if i want so we use a lot of cortex fasteners when we're putting this stuff together and that way we can make these boards manipulate these boards make them fit the way we want them to so what i'm going to do right now we've already got all this center and you guys have kind of seen us built working on that so i think we're going to do is just install a regular surface border i'll get into talking about the framing a little bit and then we'll get into actually installing the board all right guys so what you see here is we have this uh azac deck it's completely installed it we used a fasten master hidden fastener the joists are running this way they're every 14 inches you can see the clips running through the deck boards if you look real closely and so the joists are running this way but because we're running a surface border in the opposite direction of those deck boards we had to create the end of this deck with a side joist running this way every 14 to 16 inches plus we have our outside rim joist right here so if we don't create this space right here then we're not going to be able to have anything to attach this board to so you got to make sure that you prepare your framing properly so that it'll accept all the alternate boards that are going all the different directions some of the boards are going the same direction and they can be framed in at the same time you add all your blocking for your railing and all that stuff before you install your surface border but then when you get to the edge of the deck we use a track saw a chalk line and a track saw and we cut this line nice and straight and now it's ready to have our surface border installed onto the side of it so plan accordingly and make sure that you have the proper framing in place before you start trying to do a surface border or else you're going to be in a world of hurt you know you don't want to jimmy rig this thing so that you know you're just trying to put a screw here and there because that's dangerous you want to make sure that this thing is installed exactly the way you need it installed so that it's not going to roll or curl or cup or anything like that so i have this board kind of prepared and ready to go i'm just going to show you how we install it and then we'll go from there okay so here it is and this one we're going up against the brick wall so i left a little bit of room for this board so it's not completely touching the wall it's almost impossible to try and scribe this board up against all this unperfect surface i've done it before i've seen guys do it before but it usually doesn't look as hot as if you just leave a little bit of a gap between the wall and your work piece and keep your lines nice and straight and continuity with the deck and then you have this little bit of a gap right here which i'm not offended by at all so you guys tell me what you think after the look after we finished installing this board and then leave your comments below and let me know what you think all right okay let's do this hey something else that you see us use a lot are these spacers these are called deckmate spacers i you get them right on the azac timbertech webpage i think i've talked to these to you about these before um these are particular these particular spacers have an eighth inch on one side and a 3 16 gap on the other so i'm just going to use the 3 16 gap today uh just to kind of give you an example of of how even as a professional i use gapping tools all the time just makes my work go quicker easier and smoother okay so now because the end of this deck has more than a 3 16 gap we had to open up the gap a little bit to make these boards work because this wall this wall is not square to the house so we open up the gap and kind of faked it so i'm going to leave a bigger gap on this one end but i'm still going to run a 3 16 gap right here like that also when you're running something and you have a gap you got to make sure that you don't put your screws too far this way so you miss the frame that's very important as well so i've got my gap here i'm going to double check this i'm going to run this board up against here and make sure it's a little okay so see right here i don't like the way this is looking i do a lot of butt joints i don't do a lot of miters there's a huge discussion online about it about miters versus butt joints everybody's different everybody likes what they like i just do butt joints because i find that they stay together a lot longer they don't they don't move around as much as if you do on a miter we have railing right here as well so that miter is gonna get hidden underneath the rail so i usually don't do it one thing i do though do is see this edge here is not finished i'll take a rasp [Laughter] i like to kind of give everything a nice finished edge like so okay but this uh board is a little off and i noticed that when i was trying to put this gap in that the gap's good here but it's a little wider here and if i take it up here i can see it so i'm going to actually flip this board around because i had it in the other way earlier and it actually looked a little bit better so i'm going to flip this board i'm going to measure where i want to put the screws on my outside edge i want to put them around 4 inches if i get closer to 4 and a half i'm going to blow out the side of this rim joist we don't want we don't want to do that so about four inches will be a good indicator [Music] where to put the screw all right let's see how this side looks up against here i don't have a lot of room for my fingers so okay i like that better because now this side's touching this side's just a small a little tiny bit short but what it's going to do it's going to decrease the look and make it look like this gap isn't as big as it really is so i like that i'm happy with that i'm gonna go ahead and install this sometimes if the board's giving you hassles you might have to put in a couple gappers gapping tools to get the right fit it's like it's um being a little tight on this end so i'm going to start by installing my first screw now i'm using the fafsa master cortex system these are stainless steel screws and this is a cortex setting bit so you'll use this and you'll install this so here we go all right all right so that's a real basic tutorial on how to install and prepare for a surface border if you like what you saw today don't forget to click that subscribe button hit that bell icon to be notified when we're putting out new content thanks for watching guys don't forget to leave a comment below and to like our videos thanks for watching have a great day

Channel: drdecks

Views: 1,796

Rating: 4.9626169 out of 5

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

Id: oSZs05CZwio

Length: 9min 59sec (599 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 13 2021