How to Attach a Beam to a Post for a Deck _ Decks, Docks & Gazebos

Hi , I'm Jason Lake .

When building a deck , there are many ways to attach a beam to a post .

I'm going to show you the right way .

A lot of common mistakes I see people do is creating a beam like this .

You have the beam bolted through with carriage bolts and you're relying on the bolt to hold up the beam with all the weight of the joys .

The reason why you don't attach a beam this way is because there's no sheer strength in carriage bolts when you have downward pressure on these leg bolts here , just pretend that that's the carriage bolt .

So by sheer strength , I mean , like this , see that just breaks right off .

Now , I'm going to show you how to do it correctly .

What I'm going to do is actually notch the post measure down 5.5 .

Get your speed square out , come across .

We're going to be doubling up that two by six .

So that's inch and a half an inch and a half .

So that's three inches across .

So this , we're going to cut out , we're just going to use our skill saw and cut it out what you don't want to do is over cut .

We'll come in after with the hands up .

So that's your notch .

We went with a two by six double beam .

So it's going to sit right in there .

Now , all the weight of this beam is point loaded directly onto the post and transfers all the weight .

So now that we've noted our posts and our beam is in what the next step is in putting in carriage bolt , you want to use at least a half inch carriage bolt and also galvanize .

So it doesn't rust out .

The placement is really important .

It's best to go diagonal .

If you go up and lower on the same strain of the wood , it can crack the wood .

What I like to do is also add a nice big washer .

So make sure that you on the back end of the carriage bolt that you add a washer as well and then bring your nut down and bring her down tighter right out .

As you can see , we put the carriage bolt on a diagonal .

Now your beams in place and nice and strong .

So make sure you watch my show on college Life Network called Deck Stocks and Gazebos .