Designing a Straight Central Cut Stringer Staircase

Continuous curved central cut strings give a very elegant design for modern stairs, but the curved stringer and handrails can be long and expensive to manufacture.

A compromise is to make the string and rail in straight sections bolted together.

The handrail is assembled around newel posts and there’s no need for wreathed sections.

Using horizontal laminates, this sort of stair can be made by an amateur woodworker although I strongly suggest that the plans be drawn up by someone with experience in this type of construction.

Here’s the plan of a stair that I have just completed for an amateur stair builder:

StairDesigner can’t construct the straight strings so it’s DXF files have to edited in CAD to get the straight extensions.

Here’s the original Stair Designer project :

Note how I use an outer boxed string to simulate the lower railing of the left hand balustrade.

To see how to do this have a look how the parameters are set in the StairDesigner file you can download below.

You can also have a look at this article:

How to Design a Wooden Handrail for an Existing Stair with StairDesigner

The stringer and the handrail are modified using ProgeCad.

Here is a rough out of how the string will be set on site with the straight sections :

And this is a rough rendered view of the stair :

The strings will be built using horizontal laminates.

For more details you can download all the plans, including the plans of the laminates.

You can use these files to make the stair as is or modify to suit your dimensions.

As usual if you have any questions or remarks don’t hesitate to leave a comment.