Creating Your Staircase – Choosing Your Treads and Risers

When choosing your treads and risers you may have some concerns. You may be worried about about getting stair treads that look like they have been planed but not sanded. And what about labor costs skyrocketing because of your current supplier sending you un-sanded wood products?

StairPartsUSA.com features quality American made hand crafted wood stair treads and risers available in most sizes. It is important to have quality stair treads and risers as the foundation of any stairway as they will get the greatest amount of use and abuse.

Unlike many stair treads that feature a thin veneer over a plywood or chipboard core, our stair treads are made of strips of solid wood glued together to give you an incredibly beautiful and durable stair tread. You don’t have to worry about sanding through the veneer because our stair treads are solid. And unlike the veneered stair treads, our solid treads can be refinished over and over again.

Our stair treads are made from solid strips of wood that are 2 1/2' to 3' wide and placed in a glue rack overnight. Some of our competitors place their treads in a glue rack for only 8 hours or less. We make sure our stair treads set in the glue rack for at least 16 hours or longer.

Once they are taken from the glue rack, our treads are put through a planer and surfaced to 1 1/16'. They are then run through a shaper to shape the nosing. If they are a no return stair tread, they are hand sanded with 120 grit sandpaper. If they are "return" stair treads, the return is glued and biscuited to the tread prior to hand sanding. Many companies nail their returns to their stair treads without biscuits. Companies that nail their returns to their treads must use wood fillers to fill in the holes left by the nails. We use biscuits to provide a stronger wood stair tread.

During each step of production an American craftsman inspects the stair treads for quality, smoothness, durability and aesthetics. We could mass produce our stair treads but we choose not to lower our quality standards. We pride ourselves on building better stair parts because quality is important to us.

Article by Amber Burkhart