Keystone:
It gets crazier with each edition of the codes. Within the next edition or so, it will take a week or ten days to just figure out if and where you can fit any bolts in a ledger. Alternatively, Simpson and others will come out with a $7000 piece of hardware which supports the house off the deck and causes the 10x12' deck to cost a cool $196,000, including steel piling foundation to bedrock. And, we’ll still have many deck builders just throwing any size screw, lag screw or through bolt into a ledger beam pressed against vinyl siding with foam back-up and finally into an unknown rim joist. Some of this sh.. takes a little knowledge and thought and is very difficult to codify in a way that covers every condition.
Most of what the guy talks about; spacing, stagger, end distance and edge distance; and how the deck loads the ledger, which loads the bolt, which loads the rim jst., or how the bolts load/split/crush the wooden members, are all uncommon, common sense, and used to be encompassed in engineering judgement, experience and std. knowledge of designing in wood. In an effort to democratize the codes and design and building in general, it has been ordained that we come up with these complexified codes, tabulations, flow charts, etc., for the simplest things, so that anyone can do this designing and building. If only, they can follow the complex formulas, recipes and flow charts to the perfect design, they don’t really have to know anything about building.
We should rightly be concerned about safe and secure decks. We can not provide a code provision for every or any deck design, under all conditions, in any location, with multi-directional gravitational forces, plus dynamic forces. Some things just can’t or shouldn’t be done. To me, the sign of a good code would be to cover the important bases, but not any and all possible variations, so that a reasonable intelligent and experienced practitioner can implement it. And, a reasonable bldg. inspector can interpret it too, but he might have to make a decision or two also, not just parse verbiage. Why wouldn’t you expect the builder to open up the bldg. enough so he knows what the detail is at the rim jst.? Including bldg. jst. orientation, stud locations, wall top pl. condition, interior fl. diaphragm and its nailing. Then design a deck and deck ledger which works with that. And, every possible deck might not work with that, without some very special detailing. To try to codify this process and all the possible variations is just crazy. But, that seems to be where we are going.