Handrail

Back on October 31st last year I wrote about upsetting some metal parts for brackets on a handrail. The search for a suitable piece of wood and various other tasks in between saw those struts sitting on the shelf unfinished for a while, but today I went and fitted the completed unit. The long branch had been ripped from the trunk of a slightly larger parent tree that used to grow on the opposite bank of the stream that flows in front of our house, the curvy loop at the top is the strip of trunk that was ripped away as the branch was torn off by heavy snow.
Having found this piece and shaped it I took it to the site once and used clamps to form temporary supports for it in the approximate final orientation, then used masking tape to mark it where pillars and beams intersected on the wall. This allowed me to make a mock up of the wall on the floor back in the workshop with little slabs of timber to act the part of the three areas of timber where brackets would be attached. I also used spacer pieces placed on those slabs to hold the rail about 3cm away from the wall timbers. Each of the brackets was then made in turn, bending and twisting the parts to the correct orientation and tack welding them before final welding on the bench. The leaf shaped wall plates and cup shaped plates each had large holes drilled in them, the flattened ends of the struts could be accessed through these and welded from the timber contact side by running around the rim of the holes to attach them firmly together.