I love this place and get a lot of useful information from it, but I often wonder what some of these guys think they are building.
There is such a thing as cutting corners and building something that's unsafe but what you have done hardly falls into that category.
Way early in your thread you addressed the fact that you have no codes to follow, so that immediately should have stopped those who's first response to everything is "that doesn't meet code", but it didn't.
I would like to know in what world that construction using 3 galvanized 1/2" bolts through the 2x8's is going to fail on a deck that's maybe 4 ft off the ground?
I used a similar type of construction on the framing of a deck I built in 1987, except I only had 2 of the 1/2" galvanized carriage bolts through each beam, no z-bracket and with 4x4 posts. Some years later we put in a new pool in a different location and I stripped the decking off that framework and built a workshop on that same framing. Here we are 32 years later and the shop is still standing and in use.
My friends think I tend to overbuild stuff. I'll have to show them what some guys on here want to do. I often wonder if they were spending their own money instead of advising someone else how to spend it if they'd follow their own advice.
Hey OP, I think you're doing a good job. From one hack to another.
