Accessories

Failed and now I have a major project for Spring
On a cold winter day I heard a strange noise out on my back deck. I didn't see anything at the time, but the sound was the screw heads pulling trough the plastic EB-TY clips I used to install the ironwood planks. I now have a 3" high speed bump thanks to the failed clips. This is the deck's second winter. I have the choice dismantling and reinstalling the planks using better metal hidden fasteners or a much messing up the cosmetics of the nice deck with drilling through the boards and using plugs to fill the countersunk holes. Needless to say I wish I had gone for the metal clips that I had found on the web instead of the plastic EB-TY product. I wonder how many of the positive reviews here will change a couple of years down the road?

Easy to use - worth the effort
I researched several types of hidden fasteners prior to my purchase, and finally decided on the Eb-Ty. Boy am I glad I did. This is the easiest to use hidden fastener system out there. Granted, it takes two people for installation (one to push the boards together and one to fasten the screw), but what deck isn't built with at least two people?!? We put together a 350 square foot deck in three weekends, taking our time. It could have easily been done in two weekends. If your boards are not already grooved to accept the biscuits, I recommend a good quality biscuit joiner. Just set the joiner and go. I found the biscuits to be very forgiving if you don't get the slot cut exactly right. The result is a beautiful looking deck that is worth the cost of the fasteners. I highly recommend this product.

Not worth the time with Trex
I abandoned using this system while putting the first two boards down. I used 20 foot 5/4 Trex and cut the biscuit slots myself. Problems included the following:
1. When there is a crown differential in adjacent joist the fasteners tend to bend down making the installation of the next board very difficult.
2. The fasteners are too noticable. Even with black painted screws like I used the dark black biscuits are very visible from above and below through the 1/4" gap required by Trex.
3. This process is SLOW and unless you are blessed with tremendous patience and have a lot of time on your hands consider other options.
4. Cutting your own biscuit slots is a lot of work and very hard to do ahead of time accurately to hit the joist locations. This often leads to the need to recut the biscuit slot up on the deck to get everything aligned. Use pre-grooved material with these fasteners.
5. Trex and EB-ty both say the deck should be glued down as well. I never got this far as I could not get the second board to slide over the biscuits in the edge of the first board. IF I did it would have been really frustrating to then pull teh board off, apply the glue and then struggle to get the board to align with the biscuits again while sliding the board THROUGH the glue rather than dropping it ON the glue

Bottom line: I used 1-5/8" stainless steel trim head screws and set them below the surface using the clutch setting on the drill. All boards were glued down using Liquid nails exterior grade adhesive. I used two fasteners at every other joist since mine are at 12" oc. The glue ends up providing the real adhesion. The crew head become nearly invisible after you hammer the "mushrooming" Trex back down over the crew into the screw head recess. Using this process my wife and I installed 34 20 lengths of 5/4 Trex in 10 hours.

Plastic is not good
The idea behind this product is great, however the plastic pieces did not work out good. They continually kept bending making very difficult to line up the grooves in the wood.

EBTY Hidden fastener system
I have use this product on two composite decks. It is definitely more labor intensive than the traditional way of screwing down decking, but the end results are far superior. Time wise it takes approximately 2 to 3 times as long to fasten down the deck boards using the EBTY hidden fasten system compared to screwing them down from the top. If the composite decking already comes with a grove then the labor time will be less. I used 5/4"x 6" Timbertech decking. Using a biscuit jointer I had to cut for each EBTY biscuit. The Tiger Claw hidden deck fastener system is a faster system to install. However, there is alot more pounding on the deck to set the Tiger Claw fastener and often times the composite deck(I never used it on pressure-treated or a hardwood like Ipe)board will not set properly. In the future, I will probably use the EBTY system, but with a precut groove on the composite decking. More and more composite deck manufacturers are cutting the grooves at the factory.