Tough Angle
Squeaks, board movement, and the trouble of replacing a bad board clipped tight at the back of the deck led National Nail Corp. to invent a system that installs with no clips from a new angle. It introduced the Camo Hidden Deck Fastening System at the International Builders’ Show this year. A small hand tool guides tip-less deck screws, spaces the boards 3/16 inch apart, and requires only a cordless drill and a Camo driver bit. With no predrilling, the screw fastens decking to the joists at an angle, leaving a small screw head hidden between the grooves.
“We have done testing with just about every major board product out in the field today,” says Greg Groenhout, product manager for National Nail Corp. A similar hand tool made by Fiberon for its PVC decking is the Deck Pilot, a guide for driving screws at an angle through the side of its boards.
However, pnuematic guns and clever hand tools are not for everyone. “Generally, contractors like to stay within their comfort zone–what they’ve been used to doing for the last 20 years,” says Tebo. “So to get them to take on a new tool or a new process and learn it is a little difficult.” Many builders prefer top-down anchoring, cannot invest in a pneumatic tool, or just don’t like clips. Starborn Industries Inc. took notice.
Plug-In Updates
Carpenters have plugged holes for thousands of years, but Starborn found the hardwood market largely untapped. So it sped up old-school joinery techniques last summer with a patented glue nozzle and the Smart-Bit Pro Plug System.
“The problem with using hidden fasteners on ipe is that it doesn’t come pre-grooved,” says Ryan Unick, Starborn’s deck products specialist. And plugging in the past has been time-consuming: “They had to cut the counterbore for the plugs, countersink for the screw heads, roll the plug in glue, hammer it in, and since they made the plugs themselves, they would have to chisel off the top of the plug and sand it.”
Starborn now cuts hardwood plugs to use with the Pro Plug tool, a drill bit that countersinks and counterbores in one step. A stop collar spins independently so it will not mark the face of the board. The Pro Plug glue nozzle attaches to any exterior glue bottle, inserts in the hole above the screw head, and dispenses glue out the sides of the nozzle to coat the hole walls.
“We took out half the steps of that process and made it about a third of the time,” Unick says. Since last summer, Starborn expanded the system to include about 20 hardwood decking lines.
For the PVC and composite market, Cortex plugs by FastenMaster are still a strong product.
“Contractors are being asked by homeowners to conceal the complete deck,” says Anthony DiSanto, pull-through manager at FastenMaster. “Channel systems can do the majority of the deck, but when you get to your stairs, to perimeter boards that go around the deck, to any kind of custom inlay, it’s really difficult for a contractor to use a clipped system.” Cortex plugs allow for complete screw head secrecy and the builder can say, “All portions of your deck can be concealed,” he says.
Fast Future
“The manufacturers of decking are driving the trends in fasteners–the fastener guys are playing follow the leader,” says Lombardo. The latest board on the block is capstock, which puts a PVC-like wrapping around a composite core. Now that this trend is under way, expect fast fasteners to follow in the near future.
“[For] any guy coming out with a new board, and even existing companies with popular boards, the pressure is on them to have a hidden fastening solution,” says Martel.
Whether gun-fired screws, a new thread design, or a special glue dispenser, “all these ideas, they’ve already been done, you go inside and see examples of dowels and plugs and biscuits,” observes Lombardo, but the ways to power-drive these old techniques appear endless.
Adds Martel: “There are always a lot of things that are new and popping up, so just keep your eye out, because there’s more to come.”
