Hi all. Finding 10" by 1" oak or beech is not very easy. So having ordered a
1/2" router I can now consider T & G two 5" wide peices.(without bevelled join) If I do some research on this will it be doable by a first timer or expensive firewood?Thanks.
Arthur
Arthur,
You would be better off 'shooting' the boards with a 'jointing' plane and using the 'rubbed' glue joint method as opposed to t&g for finished joinery - there are various methods for doing this by the way.
A couple of reasons why:
1 - If you use t&g you won't have enough area for the glue to hold properly. 2 - That area will have 'hollows' in the surface from the machining process - which will again reduce the glue area to the tops of these 'hollows' 3 - The above may well lead to shrinkage after gluing - and certainly will if the joint isn't glued.As a matter of interest, if you are having difficulty in sourcing your materials, have you tried a local sawmill - see the link for a list -
Brian G - not a stair expert by the way, just an old chippie.
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Is 'Shooting' the cutting of a square groove on one edge and square- ish tongue on the mating edge?
Arthur
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Will this cutter do?
Hmmm - planing a long edge square is quite a challenge for a novice - especially one that hasn't even used a router before. Hopefully he can get fully squared up boards that don't require it.
I'd agree, butt join the boards - but ideally with biscuits (which makes getting the two boards dead level a trivial task). Glue with cascamite or polyurethane, and sash cramp up.
Thanks. Should I use as many biscuits as I can fit or space them out?
Arthur
Or even blind screw battens underneath to hold em together.
Making broad thin planks is a fair recipe for cracking and splitting anyway..as humidity varies over the year..
Unless you want to see exposed wood, always use MDF. Its a far more stable material.
Or make the treads from MDF with a hardwood nose and a hardwood veneer on top.
I love natural wood..but I accept its severe limitations in terms of fine accurate structural work. I.e. you need to go to extreme lengths to accommodate its movement, or constrain it.
As many as you can be bothered with. Biscuits are dirt cheap. I would stack them though (one directly under the other), and place them horizontally every 9 inches say.
I bought a biscuit jointer specifically to do what you propose - edge jointing boards for stair treads - and was surprised just how quick and easy biscuiting is.
Arthur,
The 'shooting' of a board is to plane the edge true and square thus removing the tiny hollows left by the planer or router cutters which can cause problems when gluing up.
Brian G
The point of shooting is that the planing doesn't have to be exactly square, just straight.. As long as you shoot both boards together any inaccuracy of 'squareness' will be cancelled out when you place them edge to edge.
I agree about the battens. And yes thin boards tend to cup and split. Choosing thicker boards is good (making it easier to accommodate stacked biscuits) - and hardwood nosing on manufactured board will yield boards that will slip nicely into routed housings. However edge jointing timber boards with modern glues can yield very good results.
I think I would go with a butt joint, with some biscuits for alignment. An alternative would be to make an "engineered" tread, which is a MDF base board, with a real wood layer on top. That gets you the best of both worlds, the look of the real wood, and the dimensional stability of MDF. Cheaper than solid hard wood as well.
I was looking thru ebay at that idea earlier. The engineered wood laminates appealed to me as you get real wood surface. However, a potential buyer might see a downside in thinking it wil wear out in 5 years and need replacing.. I like this method as yo could use a 10 or 12mm thick laminate on top of a 18mm mdf. requiring a 28 - 32mm thick nosing. It would be better to find a laminate with the deepest possible real wood layer I think.
Arthur
The real engineered flooring materials have several mm of wood on top (often about 6mm), such that you can sand them down a number of times. They are in a different league to your typical laminate.
Something like:
could probably be used directly as a tread
You could make your own just by gluing thinish real wood onto your mdf base, and adding a suitable full depth nosing.
I think this thread got distracted by the 'shooter' discussion. Whats wrong with a flush/trim cutter with the router? One with a bearing diameter greater than the diameter of the cutter.
Piece of 6mm mdf gripping the wood from below via 2 half inch nails.
Must be easy.
Arthur
I think I am getting lost as well now ;-O
Which flush / trim cutter did you have in mind, and what were you planning to do with it?
(you linked to a T&G cutter set before)
Flush trim cutters:
If you mean how to join square edged planks into a stair tread, then glue and biscuits will work well.
Probably is, but I think some detail is escaping my grasp at the moment.
Arthur,
One of my replies to you has failed to appear - but when you machine a board with any form of circular cutter it leaves the shape of that cutter in it (albeit minutely in the scheme of things) that can be described as 'waves'.
Briefly, if you glue two boards together without any further planing (shooting) then the glue will only stick to the high points of the 'wave' thus reducing strength and the boards will also be prone to joint splitting when in use - this will apply equally to the traditional 'cut' timber and manufactured board such as MDF, plywood, weyroc etc.
As a matter of interest, did you look at the drawings of a stairs and riser/tread details that I posted for your information on tinypics.com. Those drawings use stock timber that should be readily available in almost any builders merchants or timber yards (the likes of B&Q are unlikely to do so) and available in most of the common species of timber as stock - and the less common on 'special' order.
My personal advice (if you intend to make these stairs) would be to 'stick' with a natural timber of around 14 - 18% moisture content and of the correct sizes to avoid jointing, read a good textbook on the subject - especially for the most important part - the setting-out.
The setting out is *vital* as all the risers *MUST* be of the same height and the treads the same thickness and depth to avoid trips and falls - and this applies to whatever materials you use.
Brian G
Of course all real world stairs will have some variation, however small. I'd be interested to hear what the limits in acceptable error is.
I've just built my first stair, in a chapel conversion - so there's a lot of variation in the building to accommodate.
Mine is a u-shaped stair, climbing 3.2m in 5,2,11 steps (superimposed made up treads and risers on top of rough carcassed carriages), and the error on the going probably 3mm variation (in 285mm), error in rising 4mm (in 178mm) - apart from the bottom step where a twist in the ground floor relative to the upper floor resulted in a 10mm variation at one side (of a 1200mm wide stairway). With hindsight, I would have made more effort to spread that 2mm at a time over the bottom 5 steps.
Now I've tried to detect the error by walking up and down in every conceivable pattern - but other than measuring it, I can neither see it nor detect it walking up and down.
I seem to vaguely recall 10mm as being the figure for variation in the rise that's likely to be detectable.
To clarify.
-----------------------------------| wood for tread | | | |
--------------------|-------------| 6mm mdf | |
--------------------|-------| --- 3/4" nail
The cutter will be a flush trimmer of say 3/8" diameter using a 1/2" diameter bearing. The bearing will run against the mdf.
[modifying ASCII diagram to work in a fixed pitch font!]
OK, I can see what you are doing, but not sure why. Is the MDF just to increase the hardwood thickness? In the above diagram, where would the riser meet the tread, at the point the MDF stops?
I would have though a screwing and gluing would be better than a nail in the above situation.
A more usual layout would be:
------------------------------------\ P A | |
-------------------------------| | | B | C | | |---| |
---------------------------| D |----/ P
A = 6mm hardwood layer, B = Hardwood nosing, C = MDF core, D = Routed rebate for top of riser P = Pencil round or chamfer to take the arris off the nosing.
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