Keep it plomb — Stairmaking IV

Zombie fighter and french carpenter François sent me some pictures of a french stair making book and it hit me really hard. Lots of the thinking I poorly managed to make when doing my humble curve where explained beautifully in a few simple drawings.

So I thought I share them with you in case you want to start building stairs.

You want some tricks no? What about the way to properly cut the wreath

Exactly, put some legs to the thing and impose the final slope on it right from the beginning. You need a rather large bandsaw though.

And now the one I simply loved. Check that figure 1 down here:

While I wa doing my curve  I realised that one of the main features of the rail was that all the inner surfaces (the part that faces your side when you go up the stairs) are plomb. May sound very trivial, but when you have a turning and twisting piece of wood knowing your plomb and your level are priceless. So I went with my line and checked that things were plumb and used a lot of spokeshaves to keep that thing plomb. All this with the handrail already in place, which was extremely inefficient.

Another thing I realised was that the curvature of the turn was constant so a plane especially made for that would be nice.

Anyway, the simple jig to check for level and curvature of Fig. 1 is one of those things that you can only value when you did something without them. Which tells me that I need to make more stairs because the other drawings don't speak me so well.

I leave you with the rest of the pictures, and wait for more.