Subject: 3 board beams
Date: Saturday, July 8, 2017

Dear Rot Doctor,

I have a camp in Maine built around 1985 that needs some help. The foundation is cement with a dirt floor and a 4 foot crawl space. When I bought the camp there was a vapor barrier on the dirt, some sistering of joists and evidence of water issues in the past.

The 24 foot beam that spans the house is made up of 2x10s sistered together 3 deep suspended by 3 columns. At the columns the beams are starting to crush and the floor has dropped about an inch in the center of the home.

Although I can see no visible insect damage, there are areas of rot, the middle 2x10 seems the worst. The advice I'm getting is to try to firm up the 2x10s as best I can (perhaps injecting epoxy into the middle one somehow) and then put a 6x6 under them to take the span load.

Thoughts on this overall plan or recommended products/procedures?

Regards,
Steve

Steve,

If you could get at the affected areas from the top, it would be easier, but barring that injecting epoxy from the side would be, as suggested, your next best bet. The procedure would be to drill some 1/4" slightly down-sloping holes in the beam sides to about halfway into the beam sides. I would do this from both sides of the beam in a way that the holes do not connect, staggered from side to side. In the affected areas, I suggest that the there be two holes (one per side) in the span between joists. Drill as high on the beam as possible.

Be innovative if you feel motivated. This is like chemotherapy: the goal is to get the chemistry to the problem area the best possible way.

Next, flood the drilled holes with our CPES. CPES is a very thin penetrating epoxy that is toxic to the fungi, and will harden soft wood. I would do three applications of the CPES, allowing at least two days between applications (longer is okay).

After about a week, the holes should be filled with our thicker and stronger Layup & Laminating Epoxy Resin. The pure mixture should be pumped in initially, using our Re-usable Caulking Tubes. This filling should should be continued as long as the hole will accept the resin. Finally, to finish off the holes it can have mix of our L&L Resin and sawdust pumped in.

The above procedure is about the best you can do without pulling up the floor above the beams and ripping out the bad wood and completely filling with the epoxy, or, as this customer demonstrated doing the tearing away the wood from the side: 1822 Home.

How much of these products you will need depends, of course, on the extent of the damage. I would make an educated guess that it will be somewhere around a gallon of the CPES for every 8-10 feet of activity, and a gallon of the L&L Resin for every 15 feet of treatment.

As our notes on the CPES state, we recommend the use of a respirator capable of filtering organic solvent fumes and vinyl gloves during application.

Feel free to come back if you have additional questions. If you wish to order you can do so via phone 206 364 2155 or our secure on-line order form. We do not charge handling charges. We have warehouses on both coasts so shipping time is four days or less via UPS Ground to almost any point in the continental US.

Doc