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Winders in stair PIO


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Just transitioning to 12.01 and using the stair PIO for the first time. Have read the help files, viewed tutorials on the stair PIO, and searched forum for "stairs" & "winders" to no avail.

Can the stair PIO produce a code-conforming winder? The UBC requires winders to have a minimum width of 6" at the narrow end of the "pie", and to have the required tread width by the time you are 12" away from the narrow end. If memory serves me, this usually means that you're going to get 4 winders at most on a U-stairway. I've played with different dimensions for sides 1,2,&3 on the winder landing, but they always have too many treads - up to 9! - and I don't see a way to specify. To further torment me, there's a box showing the number of treads when I'm viewing the landing with winders portion, showing 9 treads, but it's greyed and not editable. Further, if you choose curved flight or skewed winder, you can enter the number of treads, but unfortunately it doesn't stick when you go back to U-landing winders. The skewed winders option seems unuseable as well, as anything other than 12.5 degree start and end angles makes the width of that stair section wider or returns some very contorted geometry!. Unfortunately, the whole thing's of little use if you can't make a code-compliant stair!

I'll send this in as a bug as well.......

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Hi Steve, Unfortunately you will need to "cheat" a bit to make your winders code compliant. The easiest way that I've discovered is to make the entire stair wider and then "hide" it behind the walls/floors. Another alternative is to create two separate stairs and then build your winders from extruded poly's (moved up as appropriate). Yet a third way is to use the stair PIO for modeling (ie: 3d & client presentations) then use good old-fashioned 2d lines and polys (in the VP annotations) for the submission set. I have reported this and hopefully NNA will have it fixed sometime soon. Hope that helps.

PS: I grew up in SB and one of my daughters lives there now. Great place!

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Thanks Peter,

I tried every combination I could think of, widening parts of the stair, but to no avail. Could never get down to a minimal number of risers (and not end up with a 2' wide wall between flights....).

Gosh, I sure hope they have a "code expert" on their staff to advise them when they create tools like this! While I think the stair tool is awesome and an incredible improvement, it's a sad statement if it can only make "pretty pictures" and not a stair that you can actually submit to the building department! Don't know what the building department is like up in Ashland, but I'm just concluding the "plan check from hell" here.....5-1/2 months for a residential remodel!!!

-Steve

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I could show you with an image, but I don't know how to do that without having a website. Is there another way?

It's the geometry under the stairs that I'm talking about. In an L-shaped staircase with a winder containing five steps, the bottom of the stairs in between the first and second winding step, in plane with the riser of that second step, angles DOWN toward the inside of the turn, but past the bottom of the stringer of the previous flight. The next three winding steps in the middle seem appropriate. The last winding step has its bottom angling UP to the inside of the turn completely oppposite of the previous steps. So in other words, there isn't a smooth plane, albeit fragmented, underneath the stairs.

A picture here of course would explain everything. Does anybody else see this?

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Michael & Robert,

I duplicated what Michael was talking about. First, let me observe that the stair tool doesn't address real-world issues of how the stair might actually get framed, despite the impression one might get from the opportunity to enter info such as stringer widths and depths. (And, my comments are only relevant to wood framing, not the possibilities of welded steel.) So none of this has to do with "how a winder gets built", and as I observed in my original post, the stair tool doesn't even allow you to draw or model a winding staircase that conforms to the building codes.

For the most part though, it does do an excellent job of depicting the spatial volume of a stair to assess relationships and clearances, and as alluded to before, it might even represent reality if it were of welded steel construction and could stand up on its own.

The curious thing is that the U-shaped stair I've been battling with depicts a very continuously warping surface on the underside (albeit faceted), but when I make an L-shaped winder with a straight section above and below, I see the aberration you're talking about. Doesn't matter whether I view the 3D model in wireframe or rendered. You can also see it in the wireframe model in the construction tab of the stair tool.

The bottom line though, is it doesn't really matter since it's not supposing to represent actual framing realities anyway. I just hope the next patch allows you to specify the number of winders and/or already have the math built into it so they're always 6" min. at the narrowest and are the specified tread width at 12" in.

-Steve

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I would like to make a couple of points.

Firstly, as Steve notes above, it doesn't seem necessary for the stair tool to depict the actual construction of a stair: simply it's "relationships and clearances" etc. Stairbuilders don't (shouldn't!) need anyone to tell them how to build a stair.

If the designer wants a "special" with particular construction detailing, then it doesn't seem likely that a "generic" stair tool, however sophisticated, could (or should) be made to encompass all the permutations possible. Something like that should probably be modeled and detailed as a "unique individual"

Second thing.

While it would be usefull for US users to have the stair tool always conform to US codes, the vast majority of users are not in the US (and do not use the imperial measurement system). The Building Code of Australia for instance, specifies stairs and winders quite differently than described above.

Although the stair tool should be able to draw stairs that conform to US standards, it should not default or be constrained to US standards.

All that being said, the new stair tool is a vast improvement on the old one, and although it takes more work to set up the stair, I think this is probably an inevitable consequence of it's increased flexibility.

cheers,

N.

[ 03-16-2006, 04:09 PM: Message edited by: propstuff ]

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Gosh, I'm embarassed! I try so hard not to be "US-centric" (doesn't have the ring of "Eurocentric"!), and here I wasn't even thinking about the worldwide user-base of this program. But with a little broader perspective and better choice of wording, the point would have been the same.....why not make it possible to specify the number or angle of winders? Then everyone could conform to whatever codes or lack thereof that they needed to! Hope that improvement comes along soon. Sure is a great tool!

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I've been a carpenter for twenty years and am now getting into building design. In all those years, a lot of cabinet-making and remodeling, I never had the opportunity to build a winding starcase. My question is about how the v12 winders look in 3D. Surely, this can't be the way a winder gets built and is a bug in the tool?

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  • 1 month later...

Robert,

That tutorial was really helpful.

I think the winder tool could be tweaked to allow US code compliant stairs if there were a little more control offered as it relates to the length used by the winders at the inside face of the stair too. Hopefully, this can make it into a future improvement of the stair tool.

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