Decks & Docks Fasteners

Deck Screw Installation Transcript

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Bob: Welcome back to Albany County Fasteners, Fasteners 101. I'm Bob and today we're going to be discussing deck screws. So let's get started.

So these are deck screws. They are bugle head and you can see at the head here that it has a bugle effect to it. These 305 stainless steel deck screws have a type 17-point, see that little cut that's on the tip there. So you should be able to see that and these are square drive deck screws. You can get these deck screws also in torx drive but what's very important for deck screws is the driver; that your driver bit is flat and not rounded. You see this bit, it's flat not rounded.

These are power bits, which are one of the best bits you can get. We also have a titanium nitride bit here and the difference between titanium and a CNC (they're both CNC's but this is just, you know steel versus titanium), the titanium is going to last a lot longer in time. So the titanium is a much better bit of course, it costs more money but the life of the bit is going to last a lot longer.

So when you do decks you really want to get a power bit. Power bits are key to your installation. These bits you will see have no play in it at all. The play is 0. They are tight so you're not going to strip the bit out. A lot of times-or strip the screw out-a lot of times what happens is we get calls where customers say "I'm stripping the heads out and I just don't understand what I'm doing wrong" or "I'm snapping the heads off." Well there's a few things that will cause that: first the bit; you're not holding the tool parallel to the screw head-you're driving it and you're twisting. Second, the bit is not a quality bit. Third, the bottom is more rounded than square or flat, that is very key to a successful installation of a square drive bit.

I'm going to demonstrate to you now the installation of a deck screw with a hammer drill and with a regular drill. Now when you use a hammer drill, do not use these screws without pre-drilling in IPE decking. The wood is too hard, you're gonna heat up the screw, and you're going to snap it. I have here two-by-fours. I don't have decking or trex type decking. These screws will go through trex with no problem as long as you're driving it in a correct fashion. So I'm going to drive the screw now with this hammer drill and you can see it does a fabulous job. I'm just going to get it started.

Ok, I have it started. I'm parallel; it's very important. If you start to twist the tool it's going to either create a situation where the tool is going to pop out of the drive or it may start to slip and strip the head. You always want to hold it firm and straight. Perfect. Look at that. Does a beautiful job. It's in there very tight. I'll do another one to demonstrate.

Most of the time when you're doing decking you're going into treated lumber. It's the same thing as this, it has a little more pressure from water. These are number 10 x 3-1/2" inch deck screws. You can just drive these babies in with no problem. 305 stainless. If you're having a problem with driving it and snapping heads-that head did not snap off, now it's a hammer drill pushing these in, if it's going to snap it would have snapped and that did not happen.

I'm going to drive another one to show you. So what happened there is I just stripped the head out and that was my fault because I stopped before I had the head flush and I can feel the top of the head that it's hot. The top heated up because stainless is a soft metal and what happens is - that screw is heated up and it's running to the head and making it soft.

That one's stripped out so I'm going to do another one for you. So I have a knot down below here and I'm going to drive this screw in and what's going to happen is, most likely, this screw is going to snap.

You want to try to avoid running into knots because that will snap the head off. It will hit the knot and it will not drive in. So I'm going to demonstrate that right now too because I think that this is probably what's going to happen with this.

Stainless will not drive into a knot with no problem, it's like going into very hard, dense wood and it's going to strip it out.

It just snapped. So that's a problem, even though that screw went in, I felt it snap. That was going right into, right close to, that knot. So you want to avoid knots. Knots will snap the screw. I snapped it. Look at that. So it heated up and it snapped...

I'm going to drive another one and you can see thatit went nice and flat. I'm going to drive one more. Perfect. No issues, no problems. So if you had decking this would drive just fine. That's 3-1/2 inches, that screw, so this is an inch-and-a-half. So I'm driving it into this piece of wood by two inches, so I'm going in that far plus the inch-and-a-half, that's 3-1/2 inches so that much of the screw has gone down into the two-by-fours. That's a long way for a stainless steel screw. The requirement really on deck screws is only an inch-and-a-half, that's all you need to grab into your joist when you're putting planking on top.

That's basically our demonstration on driving deck screws into the two-by-fours that I used for this demonstration.