Interior Stair Railings - Fall 2019- Winter 2020

The railings will be similar to the deck railings with the "prairie grass" theme, also in stainless steel like the deck railings.  They are made in sections for each flight and bolted together and screwed to the stairs/floor.  They start as a basic frame and then the "prairie grass" is added in as separate panels that are bolted in place.  This makes everything much more manageable to handle.

I made a wood jig to start out and help me keep everything in alignment and at the right heights.  Here is the jig with the first set of railing frame blanks clamped in place for marking the angles and places to cut.

The jig is just a piece of plywood with an upper and lower guide that locates the handrail and bottom rail correctly.  the end posts are set plumb in the correct spots and clamped to the rails to set everything up for marking.

The very top flight ends at a half-wall that required a bit of fancy footwork to maintain railing code...

And to make the returns where the railing comes back around to hit the next one in a continuous manner, I needed to get all sections set in place on the stairs but leave out one little piece at the top so I could cut the miters and loop it back around.  Here are the 4 frame sets tacked-up and ready for the test fitting.  The wood blocks are holding them in the right place to get this set up where the missing piece will go.

And then getting them fitted in place

And the returns tacked in place and the mounting bracket that attaches to the next section:

And making the panels.  These are the panels that go into the railing frames (2 per run):

And finally got everything finished, ran through electropolishing and installed:

Start to finish - all stair work including the woodwork and the metal railings took close to 7 months.  None of this moves quickly...