Fine Homebuilding: Forgive the pun, but housed-stringer stairs are a step up from standard notched-stringer stairs. Not only are they stronger and less likely to squeak, they’re essentially finished as soon as they’re assembled.
Housed-stringer stairs rely on mortises cut in the stringers to support the treads and risers. The backsides of these mortises taper, and wedges that match the taper are glued and driven in to lock the stairs into a cohesive unit. From the topside, the assembly looks like it grew together.
2 comments:
It's great to see carpentry stuff that is a step beyond the theatre way of "this is right but not really the way one might do this for a permanent install" that we see so often. I think there is a great need for focusing on training in carpentry among theatre technicians because I think a lot of people get into theatre at a young age and constantly add onto the inadequate methods they learned at a young age without ever really throwing out anything. For instance, I had never even heard of compression legs before coming here and honestly they look and feel really sketchy to me. But after having read a lot about their advantages over standard platform legging that goes inside of the frame, why would I ever decide to do that? And likewise, for a lot of platforms studwalls are a much quicker install than compression legs.
What I'm getting at is that it's nice to be shown alternative ways of doing certain construction methods. It adds to our toolkits immensely and gives us the freedom to choose the best options for the situations that we find ourselves in.
I was at first disappointed by this article but when I found the link to the full pdf I was very excited, this is the kind of thing that I really enjoy, I love the fact there are places here and there where people can write 8 pages about a fancy way they make stairs; its the same feeling I’ll get every now and then in the Scene Shop when I get excited and remember that there's a lot of stuff here I get to do for school that doesn’t really feel like work, I love that I can do scene shop work as part of my education, as well as some of the more artistic stuff which is a such a departure from the type of education that I am used to. I was hoping it would go a bit more into why these stairs are better than normal ones, less in terms of the structural integrity and more in terms of functionality, because these seem significantly harder to pull and put together.
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