This is a stacked set of spirals I made for a house down in southern Ohio.
Click on the small pictures to bring up bigger ones.
This is another example of a need to design for a special application.
The floor holes were already in place, so the landings on both the main floor and loft had to be positioned exactly.
Using my CAD program I was able to construct the upper spiral so it turned to where the landing would fall on the floor hole edge. The landings shown here are what was needed to position both the upper and lower staircases.
I needed to make well over 100 balusters, to complete this installation.
Each staircase used close to 45 balusters, the rest are for the railings around the floor holes.
These spirals had to be different finished heights, so I'm doing a setup to make sure my parts were assembling properly.
The treads and balusters were made of knotty hickory to match the homes floor material. The spacers pictured here were veneered with cherry, a wood that looked pretty good with the hickory.
I also used cherry for the handrailings. I didn't have any hickory that wasn't full of knots which would have been very hard to make a handrail from. In this picture you can see that the railing needed to go a little more than once around the form. Both the wedging blocks and the inner edge of the form had to be made higher. I had plastic sheet between the railings so they wouldn't be glued together.
Many of the parts could be assembled before taken to the job site. These are mostly railings for the edges of the floor holes.
This is the spiral in the walkout basement.
Looking up from the basement.
In this picture you can see how the landing on this, the main level, has a special coupling. This coupling is made from a short piece of spacer pipe welded to a coupling. This piece allowed for the tightening of the lower spiral as well as threading in the center post for the upper staircase.
This is looking down from the loft at the completed basement stair.
The view from the living room shows the main floor spiral as well as the situation at the loft. The stripes on the wall are the cement between the square logs framing the house.
Another view of the main floor staircase.
This picture is from the loft which makes it easy to see how the railings around the floor were installed.
From the top floor you can see all the way to the basement. This shows how well the cherry handrails work with the hickory stairway.
The cherry veneered spacers also worked well with the hickory.
Looking up from the basement gives this view. Normally I don't prefer using knotty wood for projects, but here it did have a nice look.
