In which is the end of railing (Pt. 1)

ack in the spring, I put up a railing; This is how it ended up.


The first problem to be addressed was the old railing posts. They looked like they were intended for a railing, as they stuck up well above the level of the deck, but they were in the wrong places, and far too short to be useful. Also, they were in the way. I have a tool that fixes the last problem... and here they are, cut to deck level. 

This creates another problem: there is end grain sitting there, waiting to absorb the rain (and it does rain once in a while here... who saw that coming?) The plan was to cut them down level with the bottom of the deck boards, and put a cap on top. You can see the edge of a Triton router in the picture above. (The Triton is cool. It's from Australia, and works really comfortable upside down in a router table. Yep.)

This is halfway through the routing:

And here it is, nearly all done:

Very easy, and quite easy to avoid slashing up the deck boards on each side. For some reason, they feel a lot different when the bit touches them, so I could go mostly by touch.

Then, I got to this one:

As you can see, the router can't get into the corner. I needed a solution. And I had one:

I'm not sure that there is a lot of use for a two inch chisel in fine woodworking, but it's lovely for this kind of rough carpentry.  To my intense relief, it wasn't particularly hard to sharpen it by hand. Shortly, I wound up with this:

There are many people can do this without thinking about it, but it's very cool to do it for the first time.

Next up was the stairs. Doing stairs the second time will be easier; the first move should be to prepare a level, concrete pad at the bottom, so that you can get consistent height measurements... But in this case... after much frying of brain, I had the risers cut.

Now, risers should be cut out of 2x12's the biggest chunks of wood you can find... 2x10s (seen here) are not optimal, and you can see that some parts are way too thin for comfort. The solution was to scab on some 2X4s like this:

(I think the second riser from the left is now technically plywood, but it's solid.) All that remained was to put on the treads and risers. No biggy.

Next installment: Last railing, putting the deckboards back, finishing touches, and one more trip to the BORG.