mitch
~ Elite 1000 Member ~
- Joined
- Jul 23, 2007
- Messages
- 2,636
A couple days ago a friend told me he's building a deck and would i do him a favor and layout the stairs? In his much younger days he was a carpenter, but his skills are a little rusty after 30+ yrs as an executive for one of the Big 3 automakers. Knowing I've built several sets of stairs in recent years (as I've mentioned before, I have extensive building trade experience), he gave me the overall specs and asked me to calculate the particulars and draw some basic plans. (Yay- I love doing stuff like this!)
:banana:
Well, when I do the math each riser works out to an inconvenient 7.07", or 7 1/16th + a hair. If you've never built stairs before, this basically means if you use exactly 7 1/16", over 15 steps you end up about an inch short, and accurately fudging that extra tiny fraction of an inch repeatedly is a PITA. Yeah, there are tricks, but a) I'm doing this long distance, not on site; and b) it's always easier to work in standard increments, if for no other reason than reducing the odds of cerebral flatulence type errors.
:thinking:
Then it occurs to me there's going to be a large landing 4 steps up (so users wouldn't really be going up a continuous run), so I recalculate everything as two separate flights, using 7.0" for the upper 11 steps, figuring it won't be nearly as bad to deal with an odd dimension for only the lower 4 steps. But to my pleasant surprise, that made the bottom 4 risers exactly 7 1/4 ". Even better!
I explained all this to my friend and he says he would have never thought to use two different riser heights. I told him engravers are always looking for a way to finagle a pattern so it comes out even at both ends, or all the way around something.
:banana:
Well, when I do the math each riser works out to an inconvenient 7.07", or 7 1/16th + a hair. If you've never built stairs before, this basically means if you use exactly 7 1/16", over 15 steps you end up about an inch short, and accurately fudging that extra tiny fraction of an inch repeatedly is a PITA. Yeah, there are tricks, but a) I'm doing this long distance, not on site; and b) it's always easier to work in standard increments, if for no other reason than reducing the odds of cerebral flatulence type errors.
:thinking:
Then it occurs to me there's going to be a large landing 4 steps up (so users wouldn't really be going up a continuous run), so I recalculate everything as two separate flights, using 7.0" for the upper 11 steps, figuring it won't be nearly as bad to deal with an odd dimension for only the lower 4 steps. But to my pleasant surprise, that made the bottom 4 risers exactly 7 1/4 ". Even better!
I explained all this to my friend and he says he would have never thought to use two different riser heights. I told him engravers are always looking for a way to finagle a pattern so it comes out even at both ends, or all the way around something.
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