Hello!
It's starting to get a bit annoying when in the morning you try to sneak away without waking up the family to no avail. As soon as you take a few steps on the stairs, it creaks, and then when you close the door to leave the house, you hear your son starting to wake up upstairs...
Are there any good tips and tricks on how to solve this? (without buying a new staircase)
Someone I talked to said you could nail the steps from underneath with small nails and this would make it disappear. My question about this is then as follows?
Does this last in the long run?
Kind regards, Eklundh
It's starting to get a bit annoying when in the morning you try to sneak away without waking up the family to no avail. As soon as you take a few steps on the stairs, it creaks, and then when you close the door to leave the house, you hear your son starting to wake up upstairs...
Are there any good tips and tricks on how to solve this? (without buying a new staircase)
Someone I talked to said you could nail the steps from underneath with small nails and this would make it disappear. My question about this is then as follows?
Does this last in the long run?
Kind regards, Eklundh
What often creaks is the connection of the treads to the stringers. If you have risers in the stairs, the creaking may also come from the riser's sliding in the groove where it is attached.
Creaking at the connection to the stringer occurs because the tread bends under load and becomes "shorter." The tread will then need to slide in the connection to the stringer. To understand exactly how the creaking occurs, one needs to consider the material's elastic deformation and the fact that the coefficient of friction is higher at a sliding speed of 0 than at a sliding speed >0. I will not go deeper into the theory than this.
To eliminate the creaking, you will need to either reduce the amount of sliding path or change the friction conditions.
Polytetrafluoroethylene, PTFE (Teflon), has the unusual property that the coefficient of friction is lower when stationary than when sliding, in contact with most materials. If you can insert thin Teflon strips at the tread's support against the stringer, the creaking from there is likely to disappear.
Another suitable method is to reduce the sliding by decreasing the deflection of the tread. This can be done by reinforcing the tread's bending resistance by mounting a beam under the tread, or if you have risers, by bridging to adjacent treads. I would probably screw-glue or use Dominon.
Creaking at the connection to the stringer occurs because the tread bends under load and becomes "shorter." The tread will then need to slide in the connection to the stringer. To understand exactly how the creaking occurs, one needs to consider the material's elastic deformation and the fact that the coefficient of friction is higher at a sliding speed of 0 than at a sliding speed >0. I will not go deeper into the theory than this.
To eliminate the creaking, you will need to either reduce the amount of sliding path or change the friction conditions.
Polytetrafluoroethylene, PTFE (Teflon), has the unusual property that the coefficient of friction is lower when stationary than when sliding, in contact with most materials. If you can insert thin Teflon strips at the tread's support against the stringer, the creaking from there is likely to disappear.
Another suitable method is to reduce the sliding by decreasing the deflection of the tread. This can be done by reinforcing the tread's bending resistance by mounting a beam under the tread, or if you have risers, by bridging to adjacent treads. I would probably screw-glue or use Dominon.