I don't quite know if this is of any worth as I'm not quite up to the job. but an old army engineer guy once told me to cut stringers you nail a piece of verticle wood block tto the header, then a much wider verticle to that. He suggested to put that to the floor and nail a horizonal to that and the bottom of the stringer becomes the hypotenuse of the two. i said "oh so you'e made a triangle, why not measure?" and he said "you don't care about that. You have two boards that let you draw a line on that particular piece of wood for that particular part of header and floor considering settling and shift." I am guessing hat one could then move that line to wherever needed, but wouldn't cutting one end change the actual placement at the other?
On Mon, 24 May 2010, Alan & Terrie Robbins wrote: > Dan, > > Oh the joys of older homes. Always running into this type stuff with > projects. Your tenacity is to be admired > > Al > -----Original Message----- > 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] > Tel: (412) 268-9081 > > > > > > [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] > >
