Introduction: Antique Ladder Replica

By Joy of Woodworking Hobby
About: This site is created to share my passion for woodworking and build a community to support beginners in woodworking, like me. For me, the woodworking is fun, inspiring and helps me to design, create and relax.

In this project we will build antique ladder replica from its pictures. The resulting ladder was beautiful

Step 1:

One day I came across this beautiful antique ladder design and it was a love at first sight. Simple lines, utilitarian approach with minimalistic wood usage. I just could not stop to admire the design. By the time I understood the folding mechanism and it's load capabilities I already decided to build one.

Step 2:

Overall projects took me two weeks to complete. All I had was pictures of the ladder and my main assumption about its size and dimensions was based on steps distance. I selected the step distance to be 12" and created sketchup file based on that assumption. For construction I used 2x1" lumber and finished it with charcoal color paint. Pictures above show finished project.

Step 3:

The build process went relatively smoothly and learned a lot. Yet the project turned out to be more complex than I thought. Consequently, I could not finish it in one weekend. This video shows all the steps until folding mechanism build.

Step 4:

In this video we finish the ladder support mechanism and build. This video is the last one in Ladder build experiment series. We are happy to report that replicating antique ladder experiment was very successful and useful. Along the way we learned that you don't need metal hardware to build sturdy ladder using common wood species. To finish we used Charcoal chalk spray paint that gave us very nice finish. Overall cost of this build was about $34 from which we spend $14 on paint.