My church nephew is 16 homeschooled and car crazy.
They want to work on cars, but neither my house or their family home has a good place for that.
I mentioned my yarden as a place, completely lacking in facilities, but available.
Nephew was all about it, and they were serious.
Fast forward a couple months of weekend work, and we have a rough 8'x20' frame made up of posts and beams.
It's square, level and knee braced, and the "floor" has been graded flat.
We are planning on reusing the tarp roof from a dead harbor freight carport.
Instead of rafters or purlins, we will be stretching fencing from one top plate over the ridge beam and down to the other top plate.
I'm trying to figure out a simple way to support the 2x4 ridge beam.
On a 8' x20'structure we have three 8' joists.
The simplest thing I can think of is to screw a 2x6 king post to the face of each joist.
The 2x6 posts would be notched in the center to receive the 2x4 ridge beam, and mitered on either side of that, so the corners will be out of the way.
Its hard to describe, so I'll probably post a drawing.
The king posts would be knee braced to the joist and to the ridge beam
I think this will be strong enough, even though we are relying on deck screws for our initial connectors.
We will be following up with lag bolts, but we sketch the design in the cheaper and more forgiving screws.
I can picture what you mean and I think it would work. You might want to notch the bottoms of the king posts so that there's a shoulder sitting on the joist instead of relying on just the screws. Or sister on a chunk of 2x6 to the king post so it sits on the joist. Or have the king post fully sitting on the joist and use a hunk of wood bridging between the two that is face screwed to them both to keep it in place.
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