Staircase Handrail

Ever since the staircase was fitted it has had no handrail. Though it came with one, we have purposely not fitted it in order to facilitate work on the landing linings, and to avoid damaging it while carrying heavy kit up the stairs for plastering and the like.

Today, the handrail reached the top of the ToDo list. However, prior to this we had to accommodate a change of mind. We ordered the staircase with a dark-hardwood handrail but have since decided we would prefer light European oak. A couple of weeks ago I ordered all the parts I need to put in the landing balustrade (more of that in a future post) and added a replacement oak handrail for the staircase to my order. I used the mitre saw (with a brand new blade) to cut the angles at the ends, using the original handrail as a pattern. A new blade makes a big difference to the standard of cut. I took advice on what blade to use and compromised on a 60 tooth so as to give a fine cut, but not take too long to get through the oak, and hence risk burning. It worked a treat.

Back to the staircase. here are a couple of pictures of the starting position :



The bottom newel post is in two pieces - the half you can see (still wrapped in cardboard) is an integral part of the staircase and has a hole in the top that takes a spigot from the upper half.

The hole is clearer here, now the cardboard has been removed :

This picture also shows the first job - a base rail has been glued and screwed onto the string. It is not very clear in this picture, but the base rail is grooved to accommodate the balusters.

Back to the handrail, the original came with a round brass tenon on each end that fits into a drilled mortise in the newel post. A bolt through the newel brings the handrail and newel up tight against each other. I tried a dry fit of the old rail but could not splay apart the two newels enough to get the handrail, plus the two tenons between them. In the end I transferred one of these brass tenons onto the new rail :

At the other end I substituted an alternative fitting that I purchased for the landing handrails :

Because this doesn't stick out so far, I was able to ease the lower newel enough to squeeze everything together. As a brief aside, take a look at the end-grain of that handrail. It is hard to discern now that blogspot has shrunk my nice big photo, but the handrail is actually made up of 5 separate pieces of timber glued together. I guess they do this to make the finished item more stable, maybe sticking the main core pieces back to back so the grain directions, and hence tendency to go out of true, counteract each other.

I digress. Back to the job in hand - the round mortise in the lower newel had to be chopped out to accommodate the new square fitting :

Finally the components could be dry assembled :

There is, however, a complication (isn't there always with us ?). The handrail seems very high, yet measurement shows the top of it is set exactly at the minimum 900mm vertical height from the "pitch line" (a notional line lying on the nosing of the steps) required by part K of the building regs.

This is the point where I set some homework for my readers. If you have some stairs, could you measure this distance for me and post it as a comment against this blog entry ? What I need is the distance from the very front edge of one of the steps, vertically up to the top of the handrail.

We would like to reduce the height, but we run the risk of not getting sign off when we finally finish this project and invite the inspectors round.