Curved stairs

hi everyone i'm joey uh we just finished the set of stairs i've got to get it off site real quick so i'll make this real short watch the video okay so we started out by making this giant full sized mould we c and seed the curved top and bottom of the mold and then just through a bunch of studs around the curve also i'd like to just say that this video is is not entirely linear i pieced together i think as best as i could all the different parts but there's a bit of jumping back with some forwards depending on what was uh able to be filmed it was pretty cool to have the chance to have my dad helping me out on this job he has done one other spiral staircase before so used some of his experience and we just kind of ended up making most of it as we went along okay it's a bit hard to see but we have our first form clamped in place this is for the tallest set of stairs and what we have to do over here it's very difficult to see again we're making a template here for a big piece of steel which is going to hold the stairs up of course that's going to be up here but i need to get those steels manufactured while we're making the rest of the steps so that's what's happening now that's 10 sheets of six ml birch ripped i've got another 10 to go i'm going to stop it at the cup of tea but yeah that's what we're going to make the strings out of so sometimes i forgot to mention on that last clip parts a few parts of the stairs have been professionally engineered by structural engineer who specializes in these curved type arrangements um so i mentioned i had to get a big steel plate made and there's one at the top of each set of stairs and that stops the stairs wanting to twist and so that's just to satisfy kind of building regulations and council regulations and things like that and so there is some special kind of calculations involved in the handrail as well but that's a bit down the track at this point but okay the next major issue we have is how we're actually going to glue up all these veneers so i've done a bit of research about quick the quick quickest way to glue veneers up and it really all comes down to having some specialized rolling glue machines which would be nice but don't have one so this is a concept that i saw back in the day when i was like 17 18 when i was making skateboards so at the time i heard it about it was called a glue bath essentially you make a little shallow box and either fill this with glue and dip the veneers into it and then kind of squeegee the glue off or put the veneer in here pour some glue on and then kind of just trowel the glue along the surface and then the excess blue is caught in the tray you can scoop it back out so i think we're going to try one of those versions just to try and speed up the gluing process because we have each stringer is 10 veneers thick and i think we need 20 20 veneers for each stringer so there's quite a lot of gluing to be done okay let's do something this gluing uh process worked pretty good this was the first one we did and so it took us uh about an hour i think to get this one sorted out which is right on the limit of probably what we should be doing but we got faster and faster at it as we we got used to working with the glue and how to actually get the veneers up into the mold where there was a butt joint in the veneers we stapled them together to stop them spreading apart as they were clamped into the curve this worked mildly successfully all right so we've got two stringers glued up uh so because there's two sets there's two sets of stairs one is slightly taller than the other but we're going to use the same mold so before we shift our mold up to do the highest set we're going to glue up the hand rails in the same position down here and then we'll do the same at the top so we've taken a whole bunch of solid maple ripped them down to 10 mil and we're going to bend these around the same form and this will create the handrail blank so that's the mission for today at least the outside handrail and stringer for that matter are about 5.4 meters long so the butt joints along uh this handrail section we have stapled together on the inside of the join and then we can push and clamp it into position and then clean that up afterwards okay so i haven't filmed for a little bit just because we're trying to get stuff done so at the moment we've got both stringers made and pretty much sanded up ready to go for the lower set the two stringers for the taller set one of them has been glued up in the mold right now and we'll finish the other one this week we're also having to glue up the handrails at the same time so it takes a little more time so what we did was use that electric hand plane to clean up the glue on the these edges and then sand and there's little bits and pieces little voids and things where some of the plywood moved around [Music] so we have bogged up using like a builder's filler um and then these edges are going to be the nearest i'm waiting for the veneer to come in so other than that other than veneering these stringers these are done but i do need to create on what is like what we call it the plum cap so this this face here would sit against the floor and this would be a vertical plum cut and i'm going to rebate some of the stock off each side to create a tongue in the middle and i'll be able to slide down onto that tongue well for want of a better word i'll call it a newer post but it's essentially just an end post [Music] we had glued up some large pieces of maple and just cutting that into the post stock now now that the handrail had been cleaned up we can add a top capping another 10 ml piece of maple and this just hides all the laminates and provides a bit more heft to the shape of the handrail [Music] so on the side of the stringers each stringer had a couple of butt joints so we could just route out their little gap that was created and put a little filler piece of birch ply in there now i wanted to give some perspective on these posts i just showed you and i realized i haven't actually explained about the posts so the the newer posts that's called the new posts um they're not required for the strength in this particular design i purposely worked with the engineer to make it so the steel spindles we're going to have are going to be the structural element that combines with the curve he kind of did all the maths on that and we worked out a way to secure these spindles in a structural way that way i don't have to worry about having a really structural connection for the posts even though the bottom one is going to be quite good the top one is not going to be as strong as it could be or should be perhaps but in this case it doesn't have to be it's not actually doing a super a lot of work it just has to be connected on in a way that it's not going to fall it's mainly there to look good and to provide us somewhere to stop our handrail into so i've got this large piece here what's going to happen on the top so our this is our plum cut and our stair our top steer is about there somewhere i'm going to sit this post on the top of the stringer and i'm about to glue on these extra cheeks onto the side of my post and they're going to go on like that one on each side and then i can just slide this post assembly down onto the stringer where we want it to be and we'll put some glue and screw this in place and it's going to provide enough strength for what we're doing so that's the plan here that's why the the top one is quite different from the bottom one part of that this part of this design solution for the post is because right in here somewhere there's this massive piece of steel which has got to be embedded into the string here which is going to hold the stairs up and given that there's a eight millimeter thick piece of plate in here somewhere um i didn't want to be digging too much out of the stringer with bridal joints or anything else that might kind of compromise even more so the strength of this end of the stringer and doing it the way i have we're just going to have lots of surface area glued onto the face the cheeks of the stringer and we'll get a couple of screws in where we can and that is the plant so lots of things to take into consideration but we're getting there right so we've got this um veneer with a fleece backing so it's like a uh well it's kind of like material stuff so it holds the veneer pretty flat and it's easy to work with so we're going to cut this veneer into strips and then we can use contact adhesive to glue those strips onto the top and bottoms of the stair stringers make them look like one piece of wood [Music] once all the top caps of the handrail are glued up we could shape the handrail [Music] and i can work out what height the posts need to be trimmed to weird with all the top posts glued up i could trim them on a bandsaw and then shape them with a sander and with a router so i've got the handrails cut we're masking taped off where each tread is going to go and then below that we've scribed a line uh that is going to be the thickness of the actual step so we've got to add some steel brackets onto here and one that goes across the front of the steer tread and that's going to hold the two stringers together and take the weight of the the tread and that's all been worked out by the engineer so now that this is kind of scribed here we can get rid of all the masking taped parts and start prepping these to start clear coating in the meantime the really big pieces of steel had arrived that need to be embedded into the top of each stringer so that was my next job the steel flange will be covered by a two millimeter thick piece of birch plywood uh on top of that so that's what i'm just being careful to chisel out is the little pocket for the cover because of the two different angles on the inside and outside of the stringer the steel couldn't be slid in from the top like i had wanted so we had to take one string out and then try and slide it back up once the steel was in place obviously this wouldn't be an issue if the mold wasn't there but we still needed the mold at that stage so i had to kind of make it work i measured the length of the stringer with a piece of string and then could kind of guesstimate calculate the gaps or the spacings of the steel railings and could transfer those marks onto the handrail at the same time then using a pretty basic jig was able to drill the holes plumb as plumbers i could make [Music] them we use the cnc to cut the theoretical shape of each of the treads which saved a lot of time and then we could kind of hand fit each one of those um as as the string is a little bit non-regular once that shaping was done we then glued on the solid maple flooring on top of that so this is pretty heavy steels six mil thick angle iron this is all uh specked out by the engineer a bit of a tight fit yeah so these steels have got to go across at the front of every tread there's a couple of reasons one they're obviously supporting this tread and they're also linking the stringers together and also by virtue of the depth of the angle iron making the gap between each tread to a legal limit which is going to be 100 mil or less so that's why there's a piece going to be exposed and hanging down at the front so all those holes i just drilled is to support these steels and then on the inside of each stringer there's another angle iron which is to support the back edges of each tread and most of that i think is going to be done on site i don't think i'll do that uh in the workshop just because i don't want to get too ahead of myself um we are finding every time we touch these stringers we damage them in some way it's they're so big and clunky and heavy and everything everything we tend to do dents it and dings it you can see there's marks all over it uh marks here from getting this in place so it looks like after we install the stringers and these steels we're going to have to probably sand and refinish in place but at least we get a couple of clear coats on it as a base coat and then we should only have to put one extra coat on on site fingers crossed [Music] each of the spindles is solid 16 millimeter steer and every fourth spindle has to be screwed right through the top of the handrail according to my engineer so that's what i'm doing here is just allowing the plug holes for that once on site the first thing we had to do was just hold one of the stringers in place just to get an idea of exactly where left to right the stairs needed to sit at the top and so that's what we're doing and then we can work out where to place the steel and get that fixed [Music] put the drill up there just before you get that peak about 15 mil and set right out yeah right that's great going to slide off so so i'll just mention as well that there are large hold down brackets at the bottom of each stringer because i don't think i show it unfortunately all the treads still needed some fine tuning so that was my job fitting each one of them again [Music] come around here um okay hey is oh man so it's about this it's the end of the fourth day i've allowed a week five days to install this um it was looking pretty tight time wise to get everything we need done done so i'm staying on late on a thursday night and i've got a hotel room like just up the road so i'll be working doing as much as i can i'll work for another half an hour or so [Music] and then i can be here at six in the morning or seven in the morning and we should be able to smash the rest of it out by the end of friday there's just uh lots of little details to go over mainly a lot of filling of little screw holes plugging things sanding things i think we'll make it so let's hope and that is about it you might notice there's no handrails around the stairwell that was not part of my job but the clients have since asked me to do all that as well so that will happen at some point otherwise thanks for watching everyone i hope it wasn't too disjointed for you to follow and i'll see you on the next one thank you you

Channel: KingPost TimberWorks

Views: 155,328

Rating: 4.9177589 out of 5

Keywords: spiral stairs, curved stairs, staircase, how to, making stairs

Id: YZI-h8cB5zc

Length: 33min 21sec (2001 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 22 2020