Sunday 21 June 2009

Spiral Staircases


They were not as hard to make as I thought they would be, they were fitted to the deck and then varnished, I decided to leave them of the deck until I was ready to fit the canons incase one got in the way of the other.

The finished staircases looked very nice when completed, I used some brass rod for the handrail which again turned out great.

These turned out better than I hoped, and machined very nicely using a 2mm router cutter.

I worked out the size of the treads and designed them using CAD based software, as I am lucky enough to be a CNC operator at a joinery company I then machined some treads from my CAD drawing out of solid walnut.

I was looking forward to making the spiral staircases although it was a daunting task.

After reading various posts on forums about the best method, I decided to make them around a piece of cicular plastic tubing.

I put 3 elastic bands around the tube and then slide the first layer of lime 3mm x .5 planks under the elastic bands until the plastic tube was covered all around the circumference, I then done exactly the same again using 2mm x 0.5mm planks walnut planks.