The volute seemed like the hardest part to make. When I started building stairs, all manufactured parts were made of beech, and all the old stairs I looked at were mahogany or walnut. 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 eye…exactly, they have no vision, they fail to provide a natural and necessary visual termination and starting place for railing. Machine-made volutes are primarily designed for just that - to be made on automatic or semi-automatic machinery.
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.īut I’m going off on a tangent, as usual, and Gary’s going to get upset with me. They lend a gentle slope to the start of every stair. What is a volute?Īnd for carpenters, volutes provide a natural termination for linear molding and handrails.įor 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.
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While learning to build stairs, one of the biggest problems I encountered was how to make a volute. In fact, A 75-year-old master named John Mesiti taught me woodturning, which got me into stair building.īut I couldn’t 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. And I was lucky to work for and with some really good, experienced, and generous carpenters on job sites, and woodworkers in mill shops. I went to school for woodworking, and I was lucky to have a superb teacher. What I really had to do was look at their work! From that experience, I’ve 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. Some time later, I figured out that I didn’t have to design everything from scratch - lots of smarter carpenters had built most of the same stuff before. (Note: Click any image to see a larger version.
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