How to Build a Wood Retaining Wall that will not Lean! Video Part 1. A Wood Deadman Design

How to build a wood retaining wall. We cover the basic concepts of creating a retaining wall that will not lean or collapse over time using a wood dead-man system. Also, we talk about some of the tradeoffs and options concerning the use of ground contact wood. http://www.lushplanet.net/

Basically, a dead-man transfers the load from the wall to a flat surface under the dirt. We use bolts to hold together a triangle shaped form that we built. The 1/2 inch bolts are structural. They are designed to take the load. Also, it is critical to treat the base of your posts from below ground to at least 2 inches above the ground.

Today we’re going to be showing you how to build a Deadman on retaining wall. So if you look right here we have the beginnings of a retaining wall that were building and if you come on a little closer I will show you what a Deadman is and how to design one. That is hidden behind the wall and serves the function of making sure that the retaining wall doesn’t kick out. So I’m sure all of you have seen a retaining wall where this post is leaning out and what happens is basically you know.

The dirt comes hits the retaining wall and pushes the wall out so you can see these two by twelves. They’ll be stacked up to three high and then behind here, we have a dead man. So before we get to the dead man lets cover a couple of important principles about setting posts. One thing is you want to have in the hole around your post. You want to have at least two inches of concrete on all sides and when you have you when you run your post line the strings to set your posts in a parallel line.

Sometimes it's difficult to get those posts perfectly in line on that line and have that two inches. So its good to have your pole your hole be eight to ten inches a little more. Concrete is better than not enough if you have less than an inch and a half of concrete there’s just not enough structural integrity. In the post in order to make sure that it’s not going to break the concrete so we have twenty inches of concrete down. Some people like to go but were enough for this design with this.

Deadman and at least two inches around all the sides and another important thing about posts is a lot your most of your rot happens. If you’ve ever seen a retaining wall that’s falling down the rot usually happens right here at this line where the concrete faces and there’s most the rot happens for microbes in the soil.

So you want to always build up your concrete so you have less soil around the post. Ideally, you have no soil around the post. We like to make these nice little round bases and then try to make sure that the concrete stays really flush here. Because sometimes a ten the cavity tends to open up and you have a little pit where water can gather and you don’t want that either.

So that’s the basics about the post so onto the dead man. So the dead man is as you can see it’s a triangle. So in the way, some people design dead men is with a big concrete piece and in this case. We didn’t want to do a big concrete one.

So we're doing a wood dead man. So how the dead man works is all this soil right here is going to be on top of this footing and so when this footing tries to lift up like this the load is transferred through these joints. Where we put bolts in order for it to push up in order for this post to move it’s got to lift all of this weight. So that’s what the purpose of the dead man is. So wave made small dead men around each post so that this retaining wall doesn’t kick over so a couple of other important things to do.

You always have to treat that every time you make a cut and its underground or touching ground you want to treat the edge. So one of the things that we did was on this one was we put a coat of pressure treating on the edge and then we put a coat of paint so your rot is going to happen anywhere you have exposed wood pressure. Treated wood is treated in it the treatment goes in a few about a quarter of an inch so all of these exposed parts are vulnerable to rock.

We bought this wood from Mendocino Forest Products Company which is a local company and they only sell for certified lumber which stands for Forest Stewardship Council.

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