RPGMemes

CAD made me...not lazy, but certainly changed my approach with stairs and railings.

In my architectural design classes, when doing a stair layout, the most important factor, and really the only thing that mattered from a situational perspective, was the overall height. That, combined with values that didn't change, drove the rest.

Basically we had a defined max height for risers (7 3/4" off the top of my head) so you just divided that whole vertical distance in inches by 7.75 and add 1 to the answer (unless it came out perfectly even) and that's your number of steps. Now take that overall height again and divide by number of steps, and you get the height of each riser. Set tread length as needed (usually 10-12") and now you can lay out the basics of the staircase with each step surface and riser face marked out.

From there, it's trivial to strike a line across the front corner of each step and offset it down for the back end of the stringer and up for a railing.

No geometry, no Pythagoras, just some simple arithmetic and drafting skills. I would have thought this would be fairly common knowledge in my field but on one occasion, just Knowing how to do this, in an interview, got me a job offer.