You put a joist in it's critical that you be tight up against the ledger board Metal Corner Brackets but no more than an eighth of an inch gap in other words you could have up to an eighth of an inch gap any more than an eighth of an inch gap and you're not going to get the same capacity out of the hanger primarily because those diagonal nails that go in these two nail holes here and the same on the other side aren't going to trap enough of the wood of the joist to be able to fold that down into the seat of the hanger if you have a cantilever on the other end of the deck now the length of the nails is important too you can see here how.
We use regular short nails or short screws and we put them at an angle they only get about a quarter of an inch penetration into the ledger board so what we really need to use and what the manufacturer calls for is using a two and a half to a three inch screw and nail and that way when it diagonally goes in and penetrates almost all the way through the ledger board or all the way through so we're getting uplift capacity resistance as well as with rural resistance so the rim joist is a real structural part of the deck you can't overlook the importance of it it's going to resist the tendency of the joist to roll or twist when we load the top of the deck especially on a cantilever like this so what we're going to do is instead of nailing.
The end of the rim joist into the end of the joists we're gonna put structural screws in these are going to go through the rim joist and embed into the joist themselves by anywhere from three to eight inches now that's going to be dependent on the posts to frame connections that we'll do later on but for this case we're just gonna put in these five inch screws let's drop this down and we'll screw that top screw in and we can work our way along. we're framing a deck one important connection we can't forget is the joist to beam connection there's a bunch of different ways of doing that depending on where you are in the country you might use hardware you might just use toenails an area is not subject to high wind uplift loads or seismic loads.
You can get away with just putting in Metal Corner Brackets some diagonal toe nails going through the joist and into the beam check with your local code on what the requirements are there usually it's like two 16 penny nails or two ten penny a hot dip galvanized nails in the hardware realm we got a couple of choices starting with structural screws these can be driven diagonally up through the beam and into the joist there's lots of different sizes available just make sure they're compatible with pressure-treated lumber for exterior use in the hardware group there's a bunch of different choices and we're just going to look at three this one would just nail in to the beam and then nails in the side of the joist here another piece of hardware is a strap style and this will orient to the beam catching a few nails there and then the side of the joist here and another one similar but just a slightly smaller size will orient to the side of the beam.
