CMU School of Drama


Friday, January 28, 2022

10 Deck Building Tools You Didn't Know You Needed

Fine Homebuilding: You can build a deck with a very short list of tools, but if you have extra room in your budget, here are a few more items that will make the job easier.

4 comments:

Sawyer Anderson said...

I don’t know if I’ll ever need to build a deck, I honestly doubt I ever will (unless it's a stage deck), but I always love reading about tools. Making that unfortunate pun though has made me wonder if building stage decks and actual decks are similar. I did notice that a lot of the tools we do have in theater. The main thing I noticed not seeing was the right angle grinders. I may just not be looking hard enough but that seems very useful for all those corners that are hard to get at. I also saw the riggers hammer which I thought was very interesting. I’m curious as to why one wouldn't just have a hammer and a hatchet as they both seem useful. I also never knew you had to make posts for a deck which was fascinating. The article didn’t exactly do a great job of explaining the tools, but that does make sense as it is intended for people who know what they're doing.

Iris Chiu said...

I do not have a lot of experience in selecting specialized tools for specific building structures nor have I ever built (or plan to build) a deck, but this article was very good at outlining why certain tools are good for the exact purpose of such. I did not expect to recognize any of the tools presented in the article, but I have actually learned about and worked with some of them, such as the right angle grinder, clamps, and sockets. Of course my use and application of them was towards a theatre space, but it was still interesting to learn about why they are specifically useful for building a deck. The giant square was particularly very cool to see in action; it is said to be able to fold up to be able to be kept and stored easily, but expands to an enormous size to measure larger spaces.

Hikari Harrison said...

This was such a fun and simple article to read! As someone who dreams of one day having their own mini shop in their future home, I thought that this was such a helpful article. I hope to do builds like this for myself one day. I appreciated that the article did not go on and on for paragraphs before getting to the point, and really started with simple and minimal instructions with minimal tools. This makes it seem so easy and allows anyone to make it. In this way, it is quite inviting and encourages many people to hone their woodworking skills, no matter the level. The photos were super helpful as well. I liked that they did not have any crazy machinery or tools, and was very encouraging to get people to try it. All the materials look like you can easily get it at your nearby home depot, even if you don't have much knowledge on wood or tools. I believe that this was a super nice article that I hope has helped out many people.

Phoebe Huggett said...

I’m currently on a bit of a craze of learning how to build stuff around a house, furniture, repairs, etc and so I couldn’t resist clicking on this article. Building something so structural feels further away than anything I’ve done, closer in terms of the types of wood being used, 2x4s and such are the bread an butter of scenic frequently, but yet it seems so much farther than me making furniture because of the vastly different structural requirements, the differences in tools, the fact that here these are outside vs. the shows that I put on inside. I had a small laugh also about the constructors calculator, what makes it any different than another calculator? The article itself wasn’t super useful, it simply did not go into much detail about how these tools were useful, to the point where either you know how to use each one and it wasn’t very helpful or you can get the tools but when actually constructing a deck you’re kinda lot or you’re finding yourself to have gotten excess or unnecessary tools.