Stiles for Dummies

Ladder stile

Somewhere in the office is a copy of the Macmillan Visual Dictionary, a pictorial reference book that defines many of those weird little items we've all seen but didn't know their names; things like an aglet or a ferrule.¹ We imagine that such a reference would come in handy for the freelancer who pounded out content for eHow.com, especially when confronted with a request to write about a thing they'd never heard of or seen before. You know, like Trish Jackson, who may have seen a stile before, but (unless she was a Piers Anthony fan) had no idea what that's what it was before writing "How to Build a Fence Stile." Yet she happily contributed the post at HomeSteady.com.

We won't fault Jackson's definition of a stile, since she copied it almost verbatim from the one reference she claimed to have used. That reference comprised about 140 words at Mother Earth News, an article whose only building instructions were to "...use two-inch-thick lumber and secure it with 16- or 20-penny nails." Yet Tricia managed to come up with some... interesting instructions.

As an example, here are a few lines from her description of how to craft an A-frame stile, the type that consists of a short set of steps on each side of the fence (pictured above):

• "Draw a plan on paper with the dimensions of two sturdy stepladders attached to one another in an 'A' shape." – Ummm, Tracy? a stepladder is already an "'A' shape"!
• "Notch the inside of the posts or side pieces of the ladder at 12-inch intervals for the rungs using a cold chisel and hammer. " – First, a 12-inch rise is somewhat steep, though it might work. More importantly, however, you don't notch wood with a "cold chisel" - you use a wood chisel... or more likely, a saw. That being said, we'd probably just install cleats to hold the steps, not go to the trouble of dadoes...

In another section, for building a single step over to make it easier to straddle s low fence, Trish told us to, "Hammer or screw a 4-foot-6-inch-by-1-foot plank on top of the posts... "; but our staff figured we'd be inclined to nail it instead of just "hammer" it.  Anyway, we used the Wayback Machine at archive.org to check on earlier versions of Jackson's post, and we never found an actual reference for the plans she cribbed. Truth be told, we'd rather read the original than something reworded by an author of romance novels.

On a similar note, we really have no idea why our Dumbass of the Day chose her illustration for a post about building stiles, which appears to be of an ax-throwing competition. It sure as heck doesn't show a stile, unlike the illustration above.

¹ An aglet is the short stretch of plastic or sometimes metal that keeps the end of a shoelace from fraying; a ferrule is (among other things) the metal band that attaches an eraser to the end of a pencil.

DDIY - FENCES