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Summary: Placing the vertical structure beams when building a gazebo, finding the beam placement, attaching the beams and centering them in this free construction video.
Views: 718 | Tags: construction, designs, build, carpentry, plans, gazebo, gazebos
About the Expert
Charlie Folkman Charlie has been a general partner for NorAz Outdoor Furniture since 1998. Before joining NorAz, Charlie earned himself a reputation early in life as the pers... read more
Hi! Welcome back to Expert Village. My name is Charlie Folkman and today we are going to continue building our gazebo. Now the next step in building our gazebo and designing it, is to find the beam placement and to attach the beams. How we are going to do that is pretty simple. We have 8 corners and we have 8 beams so we are going to attach a beam at each corner. What we want to do here is we are going to want to center the beam on each corner so that everything is square and everything is plumb and how you do that is take the beam. There are 4 x 4 beams but they are not actually 4 inches x 4 inches. They are 3 1/2 inches x 3 1/2 inches. So what we are going to want to do is a little bit more math. So we will take our 3 1/2 inches and divide that by 2 and we are going to get an 1 3/4. Now what we are going to do with that 1 3/4 is we are going to go ahead and take it to our corner here. We are going to measure over from this point 1 3/4 and 1 3/4 and we are going to take our quick square. Now our quick square, this is a quick square right here. You have measurements on here, you can find angles on here and you can draw straight edges but what we are going to do is take our quick square and draw the lines up and that will give us pretty much our placement for our beams. Now to make sure our beam is actually centered what we are going to want to do is just have the corner of each beam touch the edge of the plywood right there and there you go.