Preventing racking in hex gazebo

[De Lurker]

Hi,

We are building a 6 sided gazebo and we've been able to only stop some of the racking in some directions. We still have some racking occurring and would like to take care of that completely.

This is a URL that shows our progress so far and should show pretty good views of our cross pieces. Also, today, we added top and bottom railings but they did not stop the racking.

We have stopped racking in square buildings before but doing so completely in this 6 sided building is proving difficult.

Any suggestions?

Thanks, Puzzled

[SteveBell]

You need lots more cross-bracing. Put one from the top of every other stud to the two studs diagonally opposite. This will form triangles that tend not to move. You'll have to work stud by stud, getting one plumb, then moving to the next. It will be a royal pain, and you might have to replace some bracing.

Triangles are your friend.

[Rudy]

I had a hex gazebo 11.5 X 13.5 ft some years back. It had a floor in it and once I set it up, I put a 6 person Hot Tub in there. To prevent racking, it had rough cut '2 bys' between the uprights, set about

2-3" above the floor,(bevel cut ends to match angles on uprights) then the same again at about 30", going around thru 5 of the 6 openings. Between the two horizontal pieces I described, I put 28" high cedar T&G boards in the 5 sections, leaving one open for acccess to the tub. I suppose that if someone wanted less confining detail than the T&G, they could use good quality lattice work..the 1" X 2" type instead. I liked the solid "wainscotting" look of the T&G and it helped keep the wind off the hot tub.

[De Lurker]

Thanks so much. Big help. We've started redoing some of the stuff and adding new triangles. We'd had some in there already and kind of thought some more must be needed but couldn't figure out just how/ where they'd go. The gazebo books do ~not~ tell ya this stuff.

Hexagonal buildings have a whole different set of challenges.

Again, thanks.

[De Lurker]

Hi, Everyone,

We have almost completely stopped the racking. Steve, your advice hit the nail on the head (plus we appreciated the other reply, too, of course.).

We did another big support piece on top. That was your concept of the triangle going from every other post. We don't think it's necessary to do a second large triangle using the other posts and kind of like the airiness of just having one. One removed a lot of the racking.

In the books we had referenced, they had set the posts in concrete and we hadn't wanted to do that and used pier and post on it. If they'd been set in concrete, this would have handled a huge amount of the racking and we think this is why the books didn't go into the racking aspect to any huge extent. But we've always thought that wood set in concrete can have a problem with rotting out and we didn't want to do it that way.

We also found that putting triangles between the railings and tying it directly to the floor and floor joist below made a huge huge difference. The lateral motion gets directed directly down into the floor so that solidified the structure a great deal, also. We didn't expect it to have that much of an effect but we're quite happy that it did so. Also, the support pieces for the roof rafters went back in just fine and we'd used screws on all of those so it was pretty simple.

The tinyurl previously posted will show anyone interested what we did.

Things seem to be on track at this point.

Thanks again for the info. Hope our feedback may prove useful to someone else. You never know.

~~Less Puzzled ~~

[SteveBell]

I love it when a plan comes together. :))