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Posts tagged “deck”

The steel inside

Posted on 2 May 2017

Overkill is our strong suite, but in the case of the newel posts on an outside stair, I think our approach is pretty justifiable.  The connection between the post and the stair stringer is often the first point of failure on a deck.  Typically a 4×4 gets bolted (or, mercy!, nailed) to the side of the stair stringer, and as people pull on the post going up or down the stair, the short grain of the stringer starts to fail and the post gets wobbly.

 

We’ve developed a system where we fabricate a steel sub-post on a thick plate, and then we bolt the plate to the concrete pad at the bottom of the stair.  The finished newel box gets installed over the steel with big-assed tek screws.  On a recent job, the geometry of the steel post was a little more complicated because we were using 3½” thick engineered beams for the outside stringers, but the general idea is the same.  We also had intermediate newel posts on this stair because of the long run.

Rubin deck stair-8154

 

Rubin deck stair-8158

 

Rubin deck stair-8132

 

Rubin deck stair-8134

 

And some images of the finished newel posts:

Rubin deck newels-8550

 

Rubin deck newels-8551

 

Rubin deck newels-8553

 

Rubin deck newels-8558
Categories: Details, Structural work, trade secrets

Tagged: deck, engineered beam, newel post, Stair, steel, stringer, welding

2 Comments

Annals of Forensic Carpentry, Vol. 1, No. 1

Posted on 14 February 2011

The newspapers in New England have been filled with stories of roofs (rooves?) collapsing under their accumulated snow loads this winter; it’s become grimly routine.  So I was somewhat heartened to see a less catastrophic version of the phenomenon in a photo Chris Hosford (one of my architectural collaborators) sent me today:     We’ve gotten used to stories of decks collapsing under the weight of large numbers of drunken party guests, so perhaps the snow did these homeowners a favor. To the forensics, though!  What happened to this little side deck?  As we’ve seen before, carpentry can be (crudely) reduced to a battle between building materials and gravity.  For decks, there are usually two anti-gravitational systems:  the posts which rest on some kind…

Categories: Annals of Forensic Carpentry

Tagged: deck, porch, snow load, structural failure, winter

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