Manual of Purpose-Made Woodworking Joinery

Designing, setting out and making stairs 105

However, stairs nowadays can be made by computer-

aided manufacture (CAM), or with the aid of CNC

routers. My aim here is to cover the making of stairs

by using hand- tools, stair jigs and portable- powered

routers aided by access to standard fixed machin-

ery such as a surface planer/thicknesser, mortising

machine, band saw, etc.

DESIGNING, SETTING OUT

AND MAKING STAIRS

After a stair is designed to suit a particular stairwell,
either by computer- aided design or in the form of
a hand- crafted, scaled plan- view drawing, the tech-
niques and procedures of setting out and construct-
ing are very similar and are separately covered here.

Figure 6.30 (a) The original features of a ‘dog- leg’ stair,
with the lower and upper outer- strings mortised into only
one newel post. As illustrated, this created a now- unaccep-
table discontinuous handrail to the lower flight. Hence, the
introduction of double- width newel posts, or two posts side-
by- side at the half- landing (as indicated in Figure 6.27 and
6.30(b). Note that the working- out for positioning the half
landing shown at (c) is not affected by double newel posts.

Figure 6.30 (b) Half- turn stair with two newel posts

side- by- side – and continuous handrails. Note that the

newels might be capped off on the underside, or continue

down to the floor. Also, they might be the same height, or

stepped, as shown.

Total going of

top flight

determines

position of

landing trimmer

Add allowances

Face

Face

Centre of newel =

face of riser

in each flight

Top trimmer to

landing trimmer

Figure 6.30 (c) Graphic

illustration of the various allow-

ances to be taken into account

between the top landing

trimmer- /trimming- joist and the

mid- landing trimmer- /trimming-

joist of a half- turn stair.