Flat Packed Cantilevered Stairs?

Lately, we’ve been working very closely with BLUBLK Inc. a company specializing in beautiful ornamental metalwork. Often times, these projects require that finished work be shipped ‘flat packed’ for onsite assembly with minimal tools. This particular project was an entire contemporary stair with treads cantilevered off of wood framed walls. These sorts of stairs are usually reserved for masonry walls, but were resolved with the addition of concealed steel stringers and verticals. An added (and very substantial) challenge was that it had to be delivered ‘flat packed’ in kit form for bolting together only (no welding). Hence, this required all part drilling/tapping to be clearly executed in the fabrication stage.

SolidWorks® performed brilliantly for this task and the project was substantially assembled on-site in just over 2 days.

And, we’ve just received a few of the builders photos below courtesy of Cheney Brothers Construction:

  • Upper Cantilevered landing

What do you use for CAM?

Sure programming at the machine is ideal for the last-minute changes, but what about the rest of the project? Do you:

  • manually generate the geometries and then assign the tool paths?
  • import geometries and then manually assign tool paths?
  • set up macros to automatically import geometries, let the CAM software read the geometry and assign tool paths?

Perhaps it’s time to consider utilising your 3D model data more for CNC and optimized cutting lists.