Those brackets are beautiful. What did you use for floats? Up around here they like to use 55 gallon sealed drums.
The floats are encapsulated polystyrene foam. Made specifically for floating docks. They are almost indestructible, and if they ever do get a hole poked in the shell it doesn’t hurt the bouyancy.
I thought about buying some plastic drums and foaming them, but I found exactly the floats I needed, at exactly the time I needed them, on the facebook marketplace. Guy tore out an old dock and wanted to get rid of the floats. I bought enough to float my entire dock for less than one brand new one would have cost.