Uncover the hidden charm of a castoff piece with just a bit of creative thinking and elbow grease. Safety Recall of MALM Chests and Dressers. Act now to make sure your home is safe. Click here for options. Product Recall of MYSINGS beach chair, IKEA Safety Gates. Do It Yourself Chair Rail Installed HighStair Lifts Residential Chair Lifts For Chairs. Does walking up and down your stairs fill you with anxiety Have you tried to avoid using your stairs Or worse yet, have you just stopped using part of your home because of them Whether its due to poor balance, a heart condition, joint pain and stiffness, physical injury, or doctors advice, you are not alone. Every day, millions of Americans are facing similar fears. The latest statistics from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention CDC are alarming. They found one in three senior citizens will fall this year and face moderate to severe injuries. Most of these falls happen at home, with the staircase being especially dangerous. For those seniors who do suffer a fall, the statistics are grim 5. Falls are the leading cause of death from injury among those age 6. Many people assume it will never happen to them, but the statistics prove otherwise. Fortunately, Easy Climber gives you back safe and secure access to your entire home again and helps you avoid becoming a statistic. Whether youre concerned about a dangerous fall on your stairs or simply need a little extra help getting up and down, youre just like millions of other Americans today. Stair lifts eliminate the fears and anxiety associated with navigating your stairs. Schedule a Free Consultation NowDrawing a Volute THISis. Carpentry. Design before you build. I worked in finish carpentry and millwork for quite a while before I learned that you have to design things before you can build them the less confidence I had about each step of a job, the more important it was to plan right to the end, before cutting one piece of wood. Note Click any image to see a larger version. Hit back button to return to article. Some time later, I figured out that I didnt have to design everything from scratch lots of smarter carpenters had built most of the same stuff before. What I really had to do was look at their work From that experience, Ive learned that the correct way to build a house is to design the handrail first, then design the stair, and the rest of the house will follow. Im not at all self taught. I went to school for woodworking, and I was lucky to have a superb teacher. And I was lucky to work for and with some really good, experienced, and generous carpenters on job sites, and woodworkers in mill shops. In fact, A 7. John Mesiti taught me woodturning, which got me into stair building. But I couldnt find a living stairbuilder to teach me everything I needed to know about the trade, so I had to learn from dead ones craftsman who left their techniques behind in books carpenters who left their work behind in old homes. While learning to build stairs, one of the biggest problems I encountered was how to make a volute. What is a volute Pronounced Vol ute, depending on where you hail from, the word originates from natural forms, like unfurling leaves, the shells of mollusks, or gastropods and rams horns. Come on A volute is one of the most beautiful pieces of wood in a home. Its the curved piece on the bottom of the stair its the spiral, the beginning on the way up and end on the way down of every proper stair a volute is the piece that supports the birdcage of balusters at the starter step. The spiral volute design appears on fiddleheads both of the fern and the violin, and pairs of volutes decorate the capitals of the Ionic order. Volutes play a role in the old mystic golden number the Fibonacci series, they have a kind of magic. In fact, if the house is a body, and the handrail is the main artery, then the volute is the heart of a home. And for carpenters, volutes provide a natural termination for linear molding and handrails. For hundreds of years volutes have been a favorite way to start a stair rail, first because they are pleasing to the eye and, second, because they are comfortable to the hand. They lend a gentle slope to the start of every stair. Viewed from above, a volute spirals down into an eye, a focus, like the place where you drown in a whirlpool, where everything begins and ends nothingness. But Im going off on a tangent, as usual, and Garys going to get upset with me. Back to carpentry. Commercial volutes. Even commercial handrail systems available from local lumberyards include volutes. They are always the most expensive parts in the catalogue. High end stair part companies offer handsome volutes and attractive stairs can be built with them. But for the most part, manufactured volutes have a few failings They arent available in a wide range of species. They arent available in a wide range of patterns. Available patterns are not for the most part historically correct. Machine made volutes are primarily designed for just that to be made on automatic or semi automatic machinery. The curves are kept open so that rotating cutters can reach into every curve, which means the rail never spirals in on a center they have no eyeexactly, they have no vision, they fail to provide a natural and necessary visual termination and starting place for railing. A commercial volute with an upeasing right must be installed higher above the starting step than a volute with a wreath left. In addition, for ease of construction, commercial volutes curve in elevation, and then curve in plan they have no compound curves, which means they remain level until the second tread and must be set high on every stair. For that reason, commercial volutes require long balusters and tall newels a person starting up such a stair must raise their hand uncomfortably high. See Fig. 5Fig. 5Why carve a volute When I started building stairs, all manufactured parts were made of beech, and all the old stairs I looked at were mahogany or walnut. I had to make rail. And I had to make complex curved parts. The volute seemed like the hardest part to make. But it doesnt have to be not if you start with a good drawing. In fact, a full size drawing makes the best template, too. If you want to build the best stair possible, if you want to be a real stair builder, youre going to have to make your own rail parts yes Youll have to learn wood turning, too, so you can make your own balusters and newel posts but thats another story. This article will show you how we make volutes in our shop. We didnt invent anything here the volute in this article could have been made by a Boston stair builder for a brownstone in Beacon hill in 1. If you have good carpentry skills, a shop space with basic woodworking tools, and an adventurous spirit, carving a volute might be a good place to jump your finish carpenter chops up to the next level. The drawings. A volute is really made from two pieces the scroll section, which is the portion of the volute that is level and spirals to an eye, and the wreath section. A wreath is a stair building term for any compound curved piece of rail. I draw the volute full size in both plan from the top and in elevation from the side. Then I use these drawings to make full size patterns of both pieces. The patterns will go to the shop and be used to saw out the blanks and then carved. At the end of this story, Mike Kennedy will show you how thats done. Before you start. Heres what you need to know before you start your drawing What is the stair rise and run What does the rail look like its best to have section or piece of the rail. Whats the code on how wide and high the rail must be How wide is the voluteAnd are you sure theres enough room Think about the design, too. You dont want a volute that ends at the center too big like a dinner plate, or one that ends too small, like a cabinet knob. Layout the volute. To draw the volute in plan view, I follow the same procedure every time. I draw the skirt board, second tread, baluster, and a short section of straight rail. Then I draw the volute. Next, I draw the bottom tread, because the stair is going to be better if the shape of the bottom tread follows the shape of the volute. Besides, Ill need a pattern for the tread and riser too, and the drawing provides that pattern. Start with the second riser. Here are a few tips that should help you better understand the process of drawing a volute by hand. Watch the video, read these tips, do both again, and then practice drawing a volute yourself. The first step in drawing the volute is establishing the edge of the skirt board and the edge of the second riser. Where they come together I draw a baluster. The centerline of the handrail goes through the center of the baluster, and the inside and outside of the rail are drawn 1 38 parallel to the centerline, to give a rail which is 2 34 wide. Once these elements are drawn, I measure downhill 2 in. Ive found that 0 to 4 in. I want to design the stair so that the curve of the bullnose on the bottom tread follows the curve of the volute that way all the balusters will have the same relation to the bottom tread as they have to the straight part of the stair. In other words, the face of all the balusters will be plumb flush with the face of the skirt and with the riser of the bullnose tread. If 2 in. doesnt work, it doesnt mean you have to start all over. You can just redraw the location of the riser until the bullnose tread looks right I want to design the stair so that the curve of the bullnose on the bottom tread follows the curve of the voluteThe width of the volute also has to relate to the width of the rail and it has to fit in the amount of available space a narrow hallway wall can pose a real problem Given enough space, most of the time, Ive found that an 1. The Shrinkback. A shrinkback is the amount that the spiral decreases every quarter turn of the volute. In this case, with a 1. For every quarter turn, I shrink 1 in. I also draw a stop line at 9.
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