Hi, I am planing on building my treads with a return for my open stairs. A question I have is the approach to building the return with a miter appearance.

What is the best approach to making the miter cut so it looks like a professional job. I can purchase the treads and the return but do not want to just glue with biskets and get a plain 90 degree return. Yes, I know I can purchase the treads with the return, but this adds a lot of cost to my project.

I have the necessary tools to do the job, I just need a tip on the best approach.


Any input would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Mike

What you are refering to is making the jack miter at the front edge of the tread where the return and tread begin. There are various ways. One carpenter carefully bar clamps all the treads together and attaches a guide for his circular saw. Then he cuts all his jack miters at the same time!
A bold way! Some use a sliding table saw jig but this seems awkward to me. The way I did it was I used a large speed square with a 45 angle. Using my HIGH quality jig saw and a stiff blade, I cut the miter using the speed square as a guide. Once I reached the intersection of the 45 and 90, I made most of the 90 crosscut with my sliding compoung miter saw and finished the cut with the jig saw. I found I needed to finess the 45 jack miter cut sometimes and I used a rasp to do that. I used the already made return with the 45 to check for fit. Once it fit well, I simply bisquited, glued and bar clamped the return to the tread. Time consumming but not hard.

The supplier I buy treads from only charges additional $4 each for returns ... well worth the time saver for us ...

Good Luck,

Thanks for the replies. I appreciate it. is your supplier a company that is online or local to your area.

Thanks


Mike

I'm in the process of preparing the exisiting stairs to accept the new treads I built. One question I have is that when I removed the carpet, I noticed that both sets of stirs have a motised groove. Once I removed the bull nose of the exisitng stairs, what is the best method of patching the gap. The skirt, treads and risers will not be painted but stained.

I know I can use wood puddy for this, but I have never had great success with a stainable wood puddy. Any ideas would be appreciated.


Thanks

Since you are planning on staining the skirt boards, it will be difficult to patch those voids and not have them be noticeable. You could consider applying a thin veneer skin over the existing skirt boards; something like 1/8" or 1/4" plywood veneer. You would then need a cap on top of the skirts to hide the exposed edge. That's one way. Another is to use bondo auto body filler and once cured and sanded smooth to the surrounding surface, using acrylic artist paint, try to fake in the color and grain of the wood. This is called faux finishing. Outside of painting them or completely replacing them, I don't see many other options.