Fix your mistakes

It's easy to go on social media and post all of the wins - the projects that turn out great without showing the 1000 failures it took to get there. I like to show the mistakes too. In this case, I stood up the first post on stage right of the front porch, then tried to cut the middle one before I finished the masonry. Naturally then, after standing up the stage left corner post, I found out the middle one was too short!! Pictures are in a previous post. My father-in-law said it would be fine to put a cap on the middle post and raise the beam to the new height. The other problem was getting the end posts plumb, they kept wanting to lean outward.

You can see this jointers detail. I ran the outside of the beam first, then the inside of the front beam. Then I added a nailer to the inside of both beams before attaching the bottom of the side beam. Then the bottom of the front beam, then finally the outside board for the very front.

a 3.75" cap brings the post up to the line

the bottom of the beams need to get up to the proper height

Finally got the inside into a straight line

Kelley approves

Happy carpenter with a straight beam!

Because of the joint described in the beginning, I had to cut out a 8' section of the inside of the beam and a 6' section of the front of the beam. Then I ended up taking off the rest of the front as well, the joint was just too strong to bend up to the proper height.

I put two nails in each side of the cap, then measured and nailed on 2x6 blocks on 2 sides. The trick was to nail the bottom of the beams into the nailer blocks to hold everything in place. I had to use a couple of wench straps from the truck to pull the outside posts into plumb, since I cut the bottoms to the measurement of the bottom of the posts, I knew getting them into the correct position would create a perfect rectangle. Sure enough, I got the bottoms level and tight into the center post, then the outside posts became plumb too! Rectangles are amazing things

With the bottoms in place, it created exactly an 8' wide gap on the inside of the beam, which I replaced with a new board. Then I put the outsides back up and got a 6' gap to fill there, so again threw another new board up there. This fix ended up costing around $15 in 2x8's, plus an entire saturday to figure out how to make it all work right. And I didn't have to buy that extra $20 post.

Still need the front of the beam

Complete

Now THAT is a straight beam. Now if only we had clean bricks and some paint...