Dan, At Home Depot around here, you can buy those risers already pre-cut. I've seen them from as short as accommodating only two treads and as long as 14 or 16 feet-enough to reach the second floor of a standard house.
About fifteen years ago my dad and I built a 1,700 sq. ft. two-story building, the lower floor of which is a workshop and the upper floor is an 850 sq. ft. apartment. We used those pre-cut risers. The worked out great. Each tread is composed of two 2X6s. We also used pre-cut ballisters to support the 5/4 deck plank handrail. By the way, this is an exterior set of steps. Darrin Darrin Porter Senior Technical Engineer United Ocean Services, L.L.C. 601 South Harbour Island Boulevard, Suite 230 Tampa, Florida 33602 (813) 209-4247 (office) (813) 744-0011 (cellular phone) (813) 242-4849 (fax) [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> ________________________________ From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Dan Rossi Sent: Sunday, May 23, 2010 10:21 PM To: Blind Handyman List 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]<mailto:dr25%40andrew.cmu.edu> Tel: (412) 268-9081 ________________________________ Attention: This email and any accompanying attachments constitute confidential and/or legally privileged information. If you have received this email communication in error, please notify the sender immediately and delete the message and any attachments from your system. [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
