Customer Reviews

A Simplified Guide to Custom Stairbuilding and Tangent Handrailing

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This is the only book available that one can actually use to learn tangent handrailing, and classical stair design. This is an advanced text for the architectural woodworker with some grounding in stairbuilding. If this describes your situation, buy the book, glue up some practice blanks out of construction lumber, and begin your exploration of a fascinating craft. Mowatt is a great conversation piece on the bookshelf, but the only reason I know what he's talking about is owed to the time I spent with DiChristina's book. My copy is somewhat beaten-up due to the time it has spent on the workbench. I am grateful to the author for the clearest and best organized book on this subject.

More easily understood than "Treatise on Stairbuilding". I have consulted this book on many occasions, and it has never let me down. Well written, but will take some study to master the vast amount of information contained in the book. This book is not for the geometrically challenged.

honestly, if you are halfway through a curved handrail at sort of a sticky point and think "I'll order this book, it looks like it might help", well, you are probably wrong.

Lots of info, like a lot of the other stair books, but not put together in a way that will be useful in the short term. I'd say it's more like a text book. Also the term "Simplified" in the title...I guess if you are Stephen Hawking, then perhaps. But why would Stephen Hawkings want a book about building stairs?

A lot to get your head around, not going to help you out of a bind, unless your bind is something like "how do I find the vertex locations of a rake-to-level section"

The title and even the example pages that are viewable are very misleading to the actual content of the book. I did not pay close enough attention to the chaper/page breakdown. Only a third of the book has anything to do with the construction of the stairs, and the rest is covering handrail design construction. The information in the first two sections did not provide me with any usable info on how to build a staircase. If you are building a very complex railing system, this may be a good purchase, otherwise, save your money.

If your studying the tangent handrail system, this book will help you clarify what has been written in other books on the tangent handrail system like A Treatise on Stairbuilding and Handrailing by W & A Mowat. The only real mistake in this book is the study of prismatic solids. The study of prismatic solids in relationship to the tangent handrailing system is wrong. The oblique plane that the tangents to the ellipse are on, is a section plane and W & A Mowat do a better job of explaining the oblique section plane where the face mould of the wreath is geometrically developed.

I bought this book because my girlfriend wanted to construct a staircase in the old house she was converting from a barn and I needed to renovate a staircase in my old house.

This calls itself "a simplified guide" to custom stairbuilding and tangent handrailing. Be warned that it is packed with pages and pages of abstruse geometric diagrams and theory. It is intended for a professional who needs to be able to build curved staircases. However, I rather suspect that, today, even a professional stairbuilder would use a computer program for designing staircases, rather than work out all the dimensions, curves and angles from geometric principles.

This is most certainly not a book for the amateur carpenter who wants to build one or two staircases. Nor, I believe, is it a book for an ordinary professional carpenter who needs to build custom staircases.

And my girlfriend's staircase? In the end, she commissisoned a local woodworker to build her staircase. He measured up, took notes of what was wanted and went away to use his PC to make the design. A week later, he came back and assembled the staircase whose parts he had cut according to the computer's output. It is a beautiful staircase turning through 270 degrees and it fits exactly.

I wish I had not bought this book - its contents were not even useful to us as background reading.

My husband has been in the carpentry trade for over forty-five years and spiral stairs has been one of his specialities. He reviewed the book and has found several items of real interest after all these years to assist him in the building of stairs.

I bought this book looking for something to help me design a simple staircase. After browsing this archaic reference text for about 5 minutes I determined it would of no practical value to 99.99% of anyone not already an expert. I threw it in the trash.