[austinj_baker]

Hello,


Attached is a video of me walking across my back deck. This home is new to us, so don't blame me on the deck's condition. :wink2: I still think I can salvage it, but what can I do to make the awful sound stop? We live in a high humidity area, is it because of moisture in the air? Should I stain it? should I seal it? Should I sand it? I've never had a deck before.



I shot it in vertical mode... sorry.



I'll put the video in a reply below, because I have to post at least 1 time before adding links.



Thanks

 

[austinj_baker]

Here is the video:

 

[Nealtw]

Have you tried driving the screws a little deeper?

 

[carpdad]

My first guess was to assume those are screws but with smaller than usual heads. The screw heads can't hold the boards down and have become sunk into the boards and the scraping noise is from the heads scraping across the boards in the hole. If so, driving the screws deeper will not help. You need to remove those screws and use screws with bigger heads, maybe #10 or bigger, stainless steel.
You can also remove a board and check the screw hole condition. If the holes are stripped, same noise may happen. Then you may have to remove all the boards, one by one row, rip the first row in order to find the joist part without the stripped hole.

 

[huesmann]

What kind of screw heads are they? Phillips, Robertson, Torx?

 

[rander101]

Are the deck boards attached with screws or nails? What material are the deck boards? synthetic or PT wood? Based on the size of the gaps between the board I suspect they are PT pine; which is the source of the problem. P.T. pine fresh from the mill or the lumber yard is saturated with water (and chemicals) and is usually still saturated when put down. After they are down a while they dry out and shrink in both width and thickness. (See wide gaps between the boards) When they shrunk in thickness the screws/nails no longer held them tight against the supporting timbers and they flex when walked on. The answer in this case is to take out the old fasteners and replace them with deck screws a bit bigger in gauge and length. You might be able to just add a new screw at each joint and tighten the old ones.