Spiral Staircase

If given the choice between ascending a normal or a spiral staircase, which would you take?  For those who picked the former, go ahead and navigate away now.  Spiral staircases have always intrigued me, so I decided to try designing and building one for the treefort.  As with the treefort, the it was built entirely from 'scrap' wood salvaged mainly from construction sites for free! 

The staircase begins at ground level and winds up around a tree to provide a direct access point to the 4th floor of the treefort.  (You can read up on the treefort here.)  There isn't much of a guide to building something like this, so I pretty much had to design everything from scratch.  After much googling and sketching, I came up with a design and started building.

On the following pages I plan to detail my design and construction methodology starting with the initial concept.  This blog was started partway through the construction and I hope to keep it up through the end of the project.  I make no claims of being a writer so there will be plenty of pictures to aid my words.  All comments are welcome