Actually just a little too snug. As the mortise is so nicely cut, I'll trim a bit off the tenons with a shoulder plane. If I can find it ....
This is the first joint for the stairs. I cut the tenon with the router and a jig from either side, and the mortise with the router. It's 35mm deep, which is just about the limit of the router cutter.
The jig I cut to give me the correct angle for cutting the ends isn't right for cutting at any other angle, so when it came to taking a bit of surplus height off the stringer I had to go back to a handsaw.
I'd had some trouble getting the saw to start in the right place, but I remembered an old hint: cut a starter groove with a wide chisel first (which ensures a straight line, hopefully one that you get in the right place) and then put the saw in that. I was quite pleased with the fine cut - I wanted a small amount of the stringer to project above the level of the very top step.
Eventually, when there are some steps, no doubt it will. For the moment I have to content myself with seeing it in position. This is only a temporary fix, as the plasterboard needs to go up first.
It arrives on the level I had marked for the floor of the landing about two centimetres too low. I think this is because the lower floor has a slope down from the right to the left. I had taken the proposed height of the landing from the floor level: measured down from the floor above it's exactly right. I'm pretty sure the stringers down to the ground level won't need to be adapted. But we'll see.
The stairs go through between the ground and first floor, where - against the wall - there's an old beam - probably one of the fort's original ones, so maybe 700 years old. It has an outer layer, maybe a centimetre thick, heavily attacked by woodworm and quite friable, but below that the wood is like a newly cut beam, except that the colour is a little darker.
I've been cutting a diagonal rebate into the beam to let the stringer sit tightly against the wall. The beam overhangs the finished wall surface by five or six centimetres, and like almost everything else it's neither square nor vertical.
I've attacked with a saw, a hammer and chisel, with two different hand planes and with an electric plane. That final surface is the hand plane and chisel, and it's as close to square and vertical as I've been able to make it. Working at this angle results in all the woodchips going down your (left) sleeve.
I'm fitting it to a plywood template that I hope is an accurate copy of the stringer I've made. I wanted to be sure that I didn't cut away too much, and that I got the angle of the cuts right.
The next job is to cut the two ends of the stringer to fit between the cross-beam here and the newel post at the bottom. I'm not confident of getting a clean cut with a saw, so I'll try using a jig and the router to get a good edge. Of course, the jig needs to be a nice straight line, and that took some work.
Using this should also let me do the tenons that are needed at the newel post ends of the stringer. It should work better for that than for a complete cut - for the latter, once the router has taken me down the first few centimetres, I'll probably have to do the rest with a saw.
I'm working on what will be the fourth stringer, the last of the ones for the downstairs part of the staircase.
The planks I've bought have been rough-sawn on a big band saw, and after that they have warped a little, leaving one side dished and the other..... er ... convex. The big band saw obviously has a couple of misaligned teeth, so the result is that there's a series of gashes across the wood at regular intervals. I have to plane both sides far enough to be able to take out these saw-cuts.
It's ironic that it's only the very big bits of wood that I have to work by hand, with old-fashioned planes. The thinner ones will go through the planer on the machine. These have both their weight against them, and their width - the planer would in theory manage up to 20cm, and these are 25cm. But I don't think I'd want to risk them in the machine anyway.
The wood has also been of distinctly variable quality - the third stringer was very difficult, cross-grained on all four edges, so that it had to be planed in different directions. This one, however, was an ideal piece: all the grain in the same direction, no knots to speak of: just those band saw cuts to be removed. It started like this - I've put in a couple of strokes of the plane to show the wood surface:
After about twenty minutes with the small coffin plane, it looked like this:
I couldn't quite bring myself to finish the concave side before starting the convex one, so I was turning it over from time to time:
Later on, I'd got it looking pretty clean, except at the edges:
And by the time I was properly satisfied, I think I must have taken about a millimetre off both sides. And that took most of the afternoon. But it won't be long now before I start putting up the newel posts and trying to fit the stringers into them. That would be a milestone.
In Aurillac there's a timber merchant with a fine supply of oak, and I've been buying some big planks, in thicknesses up to 54mm (2 1/8th inches). The thick ones will be the stringers for the staircase: the sides of the stairs which the treads and risers slot into.
The first job is to cut them up to an approximate size. As they're pretty heavy, it needs two people to do this, so here is Alan - dressed appropriately for November - giving me a hand.
As neither edge starts very straight, it's usually an iterative process: a bit off one side to give a straighter edge, then a bit off the other. This does make some waste, but perhaps the thin strips will do for the wedges needed under each step.
Some of the big planks had warped a little, so I had to plane each side to get a reasonably flat surface. As the stringers will be just under 25cm wide, they won't fit through the planer/thicknesser. And even if they did, they'd be a bit to heavy for it to do a good job. So it was planing by hand. I was surprised to find that the best plane for the initial cut was the old wooden "coffin" plane, but I am learning a lot.
After that I cut a jig for the router-work on the sides, and spent an unreasonable amount of time making sure I'd laid out the steps properly. The jig has a batten underneath to keep it at the same angle and the same position for each step, and one on top to prevent me cutting down too far - the rebates need to go right to the edge of the stringer, as the stairs will be slotted in from behind.
You can see a partially cut rebate in the picture.
After that was done, it didn't take very long to cut the stair rebates for the whole stringer:
The end nearest the camera was cut with a hand-held circular saw - only just big enough, which is why it shows burn marks rather than a clean cut. I haven't yet plucked up enough courage to cut the tenon on that end: a job for tomorrow.
The router produces a very clean cut:
During the day I also glued up another step (only another 24 to do) and cut a second thick plank for the matching stringer. The second stringer looks like a good piece of oak: quarter sawn so with very little warp in it, and once I started planing it the oak grain - with its characteristic medullary rays - showed very nicely.
