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Component Manufacturing dverti$ dverti $ er
Don’t Forget! You Saw it in the
Adverti$$er
August 2025 #17313 Page #124
Fastener Substitutions in Connectors — Where We Started and Where We Are By Paul McEntee
W
e often get questions about using fasteners different from those listed in a connector’s catalog load tables. A question came up recently, and I said, “I did a blog post about that not too long ago.” Turns out that blog post is over 10 years old, which no longer qualifies as “not too long ago.” The options we offer as alternative fasteners for our connectors have grown since that blog post, so I thought it was worth revisiting the topic. Nothing to do with fasteners, but I would be remiss not to mention that our first catalog in 1957 was four pages long. The first “Nail Conversion” table did not arrive until 37 years later, when we added this section to our 1994 Connectors catalog. A bit more about double-shear nails. We introduced double-shear nailing in 1984 with the HUS hangers and later created the LUS, HGUS and HHUS hangers to take advantage of this innovative feature. The Eighth Day of Christmas blog post from December of 2023 discussed the innovation of double-shear nailing. In straight-nailed hangers, the joist nails are important in securing the joist for uplift, but they don’t help increase the download capacity of a hanger. In double-shear hangers, dome holes angle the joist nails so they penetrate through the hanger, through the joist and into the header. This allows
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