I have already published a few photos of the stairs made by Rick and Andy Suckely.
Rick has recently sent me the photos of the finished stair so I thought I’d write a quick summary of the project to show how they build a high end bespoke stair using horizontal laminates, traditional tangent hand railing and modern cnc.
A while ago I was contacted by Rick a skilled cabinet maker and cnc expert.
Rick and his brother Andy of Holts Cabinets situated in the UK near Liverpool, were building a curved stair with wreathed handrails and needed some help setting it up.
Here are the plans and general layout of the stairs:
To simplify the construction I suggested that they use my horizontal laminates to build the strings and gave Rick a hand setting up the design and drawing.
This was Ricks first stair and the quality of craftsmanship that Rick and Andy showed in making this stair is exceptional.
The laminates were machined up in only one day on Ricks CNC router, a router he built himself!.
This stair has double evolution that needed 2 curved strings and wreathed handrails. The stair required the machining of around 200 horizontal laminates and Ricks CNC was a great time saver here!
Here’s a photo of the horizontal laminates assembled in the workshop:
Rick had no experience in building wreathed handrails so I suggested that he read through my ebook on setting up wreathed rails using the tangent system.
After reading the book Rick used the tangent system to machine up the wreathed rails on his 3 axis CNC router.
Here are the separate sections just off the router:
Here is the hand rail assembled in the workshop:
The finished stair is very impressive and shows of Rick and Andy’s exceptional design and woodworking skills:
Note that in this project modern technology is at the service of traditional skills and craftsmanship and both are needed to build a very complex project in a minimum amount of time.
This project is a great example of how to combine modern laminating and traditional hand railing techniques with modern high tech cnc to build a fantastically beautiful traditional stair.
Many thanks to rick and Andy for these great photos.
To read other articles on this subect click the following links: