Do you have a router Dan?
You make a jig of half inch plywood. The best solution is using a 3/4ths
straight cutting bit inside a template routing collar you make your jig so that
the riser and tread meet at 90 degrees, you hold the inside and outside
together with a strip at the desired slope angle and you rout out slots on the
inside of the stringers. These don't have to be all that deep and you can make
the back sides of the slots a little more open at the trailing ends, the old
time craftsmen used to do this and tighten the risers and the treads in with
wedges to hold the faces tight to the corresponding surfaces of the slots. It
also makes fitting them in much easier. You can pin them from behind on an
angle so they can't escape and the fasteners can't be seen.
Capturing the treads and risers in this way keeps them supported such that
there is no sheering forces on the fasteners and the stairs will remain a lot
quieter, squeak free or at least squeak reduced for decades.
Without a really good eye I think cutting the saw tooth style of stringer is
very fussy and difficult and really there isn't a lot of wood left behind to
bear the load.
The router method is my preferred method and if you alternate stringers as you
go along measuring you should be able to get them evenly matched.
----- Original Message -----
From: Dan Rossi
To: Blind Handyman List
Sent: Sunday, May 23, 2010 10:20 PM
Subject: [BlindHandyMan] Building stairs.
I finished the basement floor project, including building the trap door to
access the central drain. The floor ain't pretty, just sheets of O S B,
but it seems quite sturdy.
As part of putting down the new floor, I ripped out the basement stairs,
which had been pretty seriously compromised by termites.
This weekend I started building the new stairs. Instead of cutting the
saw tooth stringers, much too tedious, I am just using 2X12s with the
treads and risers sandwiched between them. A lot simpler, but
never-the-less, pretty darn hard to cut those angles exactly right. The
big pain is just making sure the measurements are as exact as you can get.
Cutting off the ends of the 2X12 to get the angles for the upper and lower
ends took a while. I can easily calculate that I needed a 43.5 degree
angle but being able to measure out everything to cut that angle was
frustrating.
Being off a 16th doesn't seem like much until you get twelve feet away,
and suddenly you're an inch off from where you want to be.
Not to mention that the header I was resting the top of the stringer
against, was not even close to plumb, so if I wanted the stringer to rest
nice and flush against it, I had to re-cut it at a completely different
angle.
I got the stringers cut and mounted, but had to leave half way through
today, so one more week without steps I guess.
--
Blue skies.
Dan Rossi
Carnegie Mellon University.
E-Mail: [email protected]
Tel: (412) 268-9081
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
