Balusters

I think I mentioned a couple of posts ago, that I have been quite bad at keeping a photographic record of the construction of the landing banisters.  I know that I documented it in detail when I did the banister up the stairs, but it would still have been nice to have one or two pictures.

This banister handrail is now glued permanently in place, and the final joint between the two halves made.  This weekend I have been working my way along fitting the balusters.  Each baluster is cut to length then glued in place with an oak spacer block to the underside of the handrail, and a hemlock spacer on the base rail.  This time I made no mistakes with the measurement of the spacing and everything has so far worked out millimetre perfect.

I have reached the point where the handrail turns down the two steps.  There is some awkwardness here with the handrail spacer blocks because they are partly on the level, and partly on the curved section of the handrail.  The problem is compounded by the fact than the channel on the underside of the standard handrail lengths is a different depth to that on the curved sections (up and down easing).  They provide you with a pre-sawn spacer designed to fit into the curve, but I had to modify the "flat" part so that it fitted properly into the straight section.  I thin fillet of oak was glued on to increase the depth.  Once the glue had dried it was planed down to the exact thickness to match the depth of the groove.  Here is an example :

It was made like this :

Each of these curved fillets was glued in place. g-clamped at both ends, and allowed to dry overnight before removing the clamps.  It seems to have worked - none of them have sprung out.