Applying engraving knowledge elsewhere

mitch

~ Elite 1000 Member ~
Joined
Jul 23, 2007
Messages
2,635
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!
:cool:

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.
:pencil:
 
Last edited:

Roger B

Elite Cafe Member
Joined
Mar 17, 2008
Messages
350
Location
Adelaide, South Australia
I'm glad it worked out for you and you must be comfortable with feet and inches but I'm glad that when I started in the jewellery trade we had done away with the imperial measurements and started with metric. You don't have to worry about gauge measurements for wires (where the numbers get larger as the measures get smaller). You don't have to worry about obscure fractions or even worse - thousandths of an inch. I'm in the process of making some mdf cabinets for the workroom - a simple 18mm thick - not 3/4 of an inch - don't even want to think about the calculations if I was using 16mm. I'm sure it comes easy for some especially if using feet and inches throughout your career but I can't help but wonder whether 7 and 1/16th inches plus a hair might have converted to a more easily manageable whole number of millimeters.

Roger
 

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