Floor Trusses - The Only Way to Frame - LIVE Stream 02-21-2022 Ask the Builder

Good afternoon. I'm Tim Carter, and you're watching Ask the Builder. I'm live, and it's Monday, February 21st. We should have a really good stream today. There's lots going on. Just literally, just maybe 10 minutes ago, I was texting back and forth Alex, you know, who is a contractor in Los Angeles

And he's taking the week off. Good for him. He's going to go Colorado to ski

So I told him, I think my snow skiing days were over because I'm afraid of falling and breaking a hip

You know, I wasn't a bad skier in my day. I started skiing late in life

And I finally figured out once you get the right length skis

and once you get the boots on tight enough, it's really not that hard to turn

And the biggest thing the biggest fear is people if you not ski before when you snowsky you kind of get going it doesn take long doesn take far to get going pretty fast and you feel out of control And then then fear takes over and it all over

But as soon as you learn how to turn, you can just, I mean, literally you can stop on a dime

I mean, it doesn't take far to stop. So anyway, Alex is on his way to Colorado

Jason, how the heck you're doing? I'm glad you're here. All right, we're going to talk a little bit right now about floor trusses

And Alex said he was really upset that he couldn't watch the live stream

you know, being a builder. He's, I don't know if he's ever used them or not

It's kind of funny. A lot of builders, it just depends on what you're doing. But if they're specified in a job or whatever

But here's what floor trust. are. So you know what a roof dress is, how they take smaller dimensional lumber, and then they

put it into a bunch of triangles. Basically, you can create very giant, huge trusses that span 30, 40

feet out of just 2x4s And because of the magic of engineering they can make it out of two by fours whereas a traditional roof you would never be able to do that You be using big two by eights

two by tens for the rafters, very, very complicated. And, you know, a lot of big lumber

So floor trusses, I mean, what if I told you my daughter's home? I mean, that's the picture and the

thumbnail for this was made out of all two by fours. And they just put them flat

And same thing. They just make a bunch of different triangles. And depending on how far you need to span is how deep they are and also how much deflection

you want in the floor truss. You can engineer the floor trusses to be very, very stiff

And the minimum that I would go would be 1 in 360, but you can go as high as 1 in 480

And I know that doesn't mean much. just go to my website You can read all about it I am going to give you I going to try to take you back to the floor trust column here because you need to be able to link to it from if you just watching this if you come onto the stream and you wonder what the heck is he talking about So just go I pasting in the URL where you can see a photograph of a floor crust

The photograph in that column, those are actually the floor trusses we used in my daughter's

new home three years ago. Hello, Louise. Great to see you here

Howdy, howdy. And those floor trusses span about 28 feet. Now think about that

No bearing holes. So floor trusses allow you do a lot of really interesting things if you like an open floor plan

They're really, and they're not that much more expensive. And what's interesting is they go together so fast

What's also really good about floor trusses, another really great thing, is they are all made in the same template

In other words, at the factory, when they set everything up, every floor

trust comes out identical. I mean, within a 16th of an inch. Okay. What that means is that as long as

your bearing walls are level and everything's square, that means your floor is going to be

perfectly flat. All right. So that's so important