re: Building Deer Stands with EZ Brackets

Just to add to the thread, I've built 2 stands with the brackets academy sports sells. One was a 4x4 with the actual house portion being built out scrap lumber integrated with my custom tittyflage camo pattern. The other is a big 6x6 I built this year. It's rooomy.





Those 2 pics above show the big 6x6. I dropped that bad boy like a boss trying to raise it by myself in the dark during a lightning storm using the tractor FEL...a stout toddy or two had been consumed. Once I fixed the house, I wound up just raising it with tractor forks and sticking the legs in and fastening to the brackets with lags and setting it back down and framing up the supports.

I anchored it with a coated 1/2" cable attached to the floor joists and then attached the cable and turnbuckle to a chain that is anchored in a 4 foot deep hole full of concrete situated directly under the stand. It works well.

I put steel mill gravel under all of the tower leg footings. The steel mill gravel sets up like concrete and prevents settling. That's a lot of weight concentrated in 4 small footprints to depend on no settling.





The last 2 are of a 4 1/2'x 4 1/2' stand I made 5 years ago out of scrap lumber and treated fence boards for the sides. It weighs alot. Zoom in on the 1st pic of this stand to see the highly effective tittyflage camo pattern. It makes you invisible to the deer.

I actually decided to build a platform for this one with the brackets and tower legs and support framing all attached and standing AND THEN set the stand on the platform and fastened it to the platform. That worked great. The wasps love the area under the platform.

I anchored it by welding up some brackets out of 1/4" stock two inch angle iron with thick-walled round tubing welded to the angle iron. I then drove 4 foot long rebar sections through each of the bracket's pipe and into the ground to anchor all 4 legs. I basically made the exact same anchor that the bracket manufacturer wanted me to order in the instruction manual.

I've been very pleased with mine. It's way better than augering 4 holes and getting them square and toting quikrete around, etc. I feel that not having to deal with all of that probably offsets the cost of the brackets. I think next year I'm going to weld up my own brackets now that I see how they are done.

One thing to add, like somebody else mentioned, if you go with tower brackets, walking the stand up and getting the legs to stick is dicey AF. I highly recommend either building a platform that you can walk up with pretty much any atv or manpower AND THEN build your stand on that platform, OR get somebody with a tractor and FEL with forks on the FEL to come out and actually lift the stand either onto the platform or lift it while the others install the 4x4 tower legs.

I'll never try walking a fully loaded tower stand up like that again. Frick that noise.