Finally started the spiral staircase repair for the workshop landlady. I confess I put this off for a few years as I was unsure how I wanted to tackle it.
These are homemade by her late husband. I believe he was using an old plan from Sunset magazine from the late 70’s or early 80’s. Despite living in the house for decades and raising their children here he never got back to finishing them. As well as having no handrail the stairs are considerable bounce to them. So much so that her family has been begging her to replace the stairs with a standard staircase.
I don’t believe that a standard staircase is possible given the main floor and basement floor plan even with a landing to shorten the run. You either run into a doorway or whack your head going down or totally mess up the main floor flow as you would have to enlarge the hole in the floor for the stairs to solve the headroom problem.
My first plan was to build a form and make a laminated stringer to replace the bands of cedar he started using. After measuring the staircase out I found that the stairs are far from consistent. The radius of the treads vary over an 1” from the top to the bottom step. I therefore decided I would have to laminate the stringer in place.
That decision created another problem. As I started adding the first lamination I quickly realized that the variation in the curvature was very noticeable. Since I could not solve that within the construction of the staircase I instead shimmed the stringer at several treads to fair out the curve.
So far I have completed five 1/4” laminates using plywood. The last lamination with be solid wood so I can match the existing stairs. A solid wood edge band on the stringer with hide the lamination layers. After all that I can begin the handrail.
My Elysium 