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Welcome to the Bunnings Workshop community @eventswestjohn. It's amazing that you've joined us, and many thanks for your question about deck construction.
How high is your deck from the ground? You might need to have a search for a deck calculator that would work with your design approach. The calculator used above does not support that functionality. Typically, you would either run the joists over the bearers, or for a single layer deck, have the joists by themselves with noggins between them.
An option would be to have the 140 x 45mm timbers spaced every 450mm across the 6000mm span and lay the decking perpendicular to them.
Please let me know if you have questions.
Mitchell
Hi John (@eventswestjohn),
You are correct that there would be lots of supports across the span. That's one of the issues with a single level deck. Here's a recent discussion from @Fadi about their Low level decking over concrete. You'll note they are planning on using 44 supports over their 6000 x 2000mm area. If you check out some timber span tables, you'll able to work out the maximum 140 x 45mm can span un-supported.
What is the deck being built above?
Mitchell
There aren't specific span tables for our products, John (@eventswestjohn). They are industry-wide specifications for Pine MGP-10 located in the Building Code of Australia or NCC. You can view a copy of them on the NCC website. It's a fairly intense set of documents with thousands of pages. You will find excerpts on timber suppliers webpages that do a reasonable job of summarizing. Here is Hyne timber's technical data sheet for residential timber decks.
Mitchell
Unfortunately, these are not span tables created by the suppliers stating what their timber can span, @eventswestjohn. They are extracted from tables in the NCC that state the maximum span for MGP10. MGP10 is their tested grade specified by the manufacturer, which then needs to be cross-referenced with the NCC to find out what its max span would be. Builder's know the max spans off the top of their head as it's something they're studied for years. However, for a D.I.Y.'er, you would need to start with the NCC then locate the relevant AS documents such as AS1684 span tables MGP10 and possible AS 4785.1 (both of which cost money to access).
After the weekend, I'll contact the manufacturer of that product to see if they have put anything together that might assist.
Mitchell
I've had no success with an extracted span table, @eventswestjohn.
After spending some time Googling various span tables available online, it appears that a continuous length of 120 x 45mm mgp10 would span the 1500mm.
Mitchell
Visitors to this popular discussion will find the following resource helpful - How to build a low-level deck
@eventswestjohn: did you need any further assistance with your project? Don't hesitate to let us know if we can assist.
We are looking forward to seeing what you can achieve.
Jason
