Stair-Building and the Steel Square is an illustrated manual of stair construction, handrailing and practical layout. Published by the American Technical Society in Chicago in 1917, it credits Fred T. Hodgson and Morris Williams for the stair-building section and Morris Williams for the steel-square section.
Two connected branches of building craft
The introduction presents the staircase as both a major architectural feature and a demanding construction problem. It argues that mistakes in the layout of the stairs make later work, particularly the handrail, more difficult.
The book therefore begins with the body of the stair before moving into the geometry of curved rail work. The separate steel-square section extends the reader’s layout methods into polygons and roof framing.
For a craft reference collection, this combination is useful. It joins the understanding of a particular building element with a widely used tool for setting out angles, proportions and lengths.
Terms, proportions and setting out
The opening stair-building material introduces definitions and considers the relationship between rise, tread and the space available for the stairway. Diagrams accompany the explanation of the parts and their arrangement.
Setting out stairs and making a pitch-board follow. These sections connect the overall dimensions of the flight with the repeated pattern that guides construction.
The historical dimensions in the text record the authors’ practice. They are not a statement of current building-code requirements, which must be checked separately for any actual construction project.
Strings, openings and changes of direction
The contents lead through well-holes, close-string stairs and open-newel stairs. These topics explain how the stair relates to the opening through the floor and to the members that support or define its edges.
Stairs with curved turns receive separate attention. The drawings show why a change in plan can affect the arrangement of steps and the development of a handrail.
This progression is helpful for readers learning to interpret older carpentry drawings. The book builds from familiar straight flights toward forms whose geometry is harder to understand from a finished photograph alone.
Geometrical stairs and handrails
A substantial part of the stair section concerns geometrical stairways and handrailing. Wreaths, the tangent system, bevels and face-molds appear as related parts of shaping a rail through a turn.
The illustrations require careful reading because they connect plan, elevation and the shape of the working material. A line in one view often has meaning only when compared with the adjoining construction.
These pages make the volume particularly relevant to traditional joinery and restoration research. They preserve the vocabulary and graphical methods used to develop curved work before a component was cut to its final form.
The steel square in layout
The second part opens with the steel square itself and the features expected of it. It then applies the tool to miters and the sides of polygons before moving to roof framing.
General framing problems lead into common-rafter heel cuts, hips and the heel cuts of hip and valley rafters. The square is presented as a means of transferring geometric relationships into practical marks on timber.
For readers interested in self-sufficiency and workshop skill, this is a useful example of how a simple tool supports a wide range of calculations and layouts. The value lies in understanding the relationships behind the marks, not merely copying an isolated setting.
Working with the digital copy
This free ebook suits carpentry historians, traditional joiners and readers studying stair geometry or early steel-square instruction. It is an instructional reference with many diagrams rather than a collection of decorative stair photographs.
The PDF contains 113 digital pages, including the original cover, title and copyright leaves, introduction, contents, illustrations and both instructional parts. The two parts have their own printed pagination, so the PDF counter does not directly match every page reference.
Enlarge the geometry drawings when tracing construction lines or comparing a face-mold with its plan. Reading the accompanying explanation is essential: the figures illustrate successive stages of a method, and a single diagram may not contain every assumption needed to understand the operation.
Book details
- Author: Fred T. Hodgson and Morris Williams
- Publisher: American Technical Society, Chicago
- Year: 1917
- Edition: 1917 issue; copyright 1910 and 1916; no numbered edition stated
- Digital length: 113 PDF pages
- Language: English
- File size: 13.28 MB
