Materials Needed for Building a Spiral Staircase

Series Summary

Spiral steel staircases are extremely space efficient and sturdy, allowing people to climb to a higher floor by spiraling in a tight radius. Making one of these staircases requires some considerable skill in steel fabrication. This process involves cutting and molding the metal and using it to create a structure. Welding is also an important aspect to steel fabrication and can be used to build these spiral staircases.

In this free video series, Wendell Moon, fabrication and welding expert, demonstrates some key components of building a spiral staircase including: choosing material shape, size, and gauge, attaching the stairs, pickets, hand rail, and platform.

Video Transcript

" Hi! I am Weldon Moon on behalf of Expertvillage.com. I am going to just show you a few steps to building a spiral staircase. One is to obtain the materials you need to do it. One, you need some type of a top for your pole, at the center of your spiral, so that someone is not sticking their hands down in and have them catching rain water and all kinds of things. So we have chosen a sphere that we attach to the top, lot of people would think well I can just weld that on but in this case do not do it. It is better to attach it with screws on the inside of the pipe. Two, when they move this and powder coat it finish your product, they need to be able to hold it and that is one of the ways, that they can hold it by sticking something inside, so that is one of the reasons you do not want to do that, another piece we use for the handrail, this is one that we normally use. This is a piece of 2 x 1 channel, 1 x 8 thick, it works quite well because you can roll it, there is enough strength to be able to do that and also you will be able to twist and that helps you as you put that handrail on to your spiral. The pickets normally that we have used are ¾ x ¾ square tubing and it is a 065 wall thickness on, it works great for pickets. Then also our center pipe does not need to be heavy, so you can use something very light and not add weight to it, but as you can see this is a 4 x 1/8 thick tubing and it is exactly 4 inches in diameter, you can find that is not a pipe, it is a tubing and so it takes a little bit of looking around to get that one and then also use diamond plate 10 gauge diamond plate. That has been formed and cut to the sizes that we need and that how we use for our trades. "