How To Shave A Floor Joist

By only covering the trimmable end of the triforce open joist your floor system will be fire compliant as per exception 4 to section r302 13 of the 2015 2018 irc.

How to shave a floor joist.

Vibration control with minimal effort and cost. We considered it but we just weren t going to do that. To address this unique area of the floor we decided to remove the existing 5 8 inch osb plane the joist using a standard handheld planer and install. Essentially a hump on the floor was created by the excessively crowning joist.

What we found is that one technique is to pull up the subfloor and shave down the top of the joist. Given that there is as much as 1 rise in a couple of the joists it is far too much to simply plane down the sub floor. Bending however is a more realistic concern because it takes much less load to exceed the allowable deflection of a floor. I also didn t want to fall through the floor into the garage.

Because there s always an inch to shave off here and there. However since this joist is already doubled and the extra strength seems to be stopping it from behaving like the other joists would it be safe to shave it down about of an inch at the middle sloping up to each side so as to level the floor and regain the lost inch of ceiling height. I wasn t even sure how we were going to evenly do that anyway. Of course this will likely impact your baseboards and other trim too but that type of hump could certainly be seen as warranting the attention.

The joist on the other side of the crowned joist was properly level meaning it was in plane with the end joist. If the floor framing is wide open snap a chalkline on the side of the joist and run your circular saw on that. You would either have to shave down the high joists or shim the others. In the past 2x4s or 2x6s were sometimes used as floor joists.

True floor joist span calculations can only be made by a structural engineer or contractor. In buildings with basements the first level of floor joists serves the same purpose. Floor joists installed on second or third or higher levels double as ceiling joists for the level below. You could go so far as to screw a guide to the joist if you don t trust your skills but it s a matter of finding a comfortable position and bracing against the joist with your hands.

This size is no longer acceptable when framing a structure.