Our house has an old spiral staircase going from the kitchen on the ground floor up to the second floor. It has a railing of iron but no proper handrail, just a flat iron bar. In the old days it used to be a wooden handrail and at the bottom a nice decoration of some sort. We have the decoration - a fantastic crystal ball - but no handrail. In many houses the owner could not afford to have a handrail as it used to be very expensive and today it is impossible to get a professional carpenter to do anything like that. It has to be done on site and all by hand so it would cost a fortune. So – the only we could get a nice handrail would be to make one myself.

 It took quite a long time for me and a lot of thinking before I decided that I might be able to do it. I was planning every step in the production process in detail and tried to figure out what kind of tools I would need for the work.

I figured out that I would need a number o chisels, a powerful hand hold router, a powerful sabre saw, a rasp and a number of other hand tools. I also realized that I would need access to some heavy professional carpenters workshop machines from time to time, like a planer, a band saw and a table circular saw. I am lucky enough to have a friend that is a professional cabinet maker and he is happy to lend me his workshop as long as he does not have to make the handrail, which he thinks is too big a job. He is also willing to discuss tips and tricks with me as I work along.

The first choice was what kind of wood to use. To be able to work with, it must not be too hard and have an even texture. The most obvious choice was lime or basswood as it is called in US. It has an even almost white colour which makes it very suitable to tint afterwards.

One of the problems was however that the handrail curves quite a lot, which means the pieces of wood did not only have to be quite wide, they also had to be quite thick. The thicker and wider the fewer parts to assemble and the less joints that could go wrong.

Most wood comes in planks that are little more than 50 mm thick and that would not be sufficient. After doing some testing I however came to the conclusion that pieces of at least 100 mm thickness would be needed. So I had to glue at least two planks together to get the right thickness.

Another problem I had was that no shop I was looking in carried router bits of the size I needed for the work. Most of the bits they have in hardware stores are for decoration routing like picture frames and such things. I needed BIG routers with diameters of about 65 mm.

The most difficult problem was however that it took quite a good spatial intelligence – or experience - to figure out how this railing really should look like and after that start to cut it out from a solid, heavy, block of wood. Next time I will tell you how I trained my spatial feeling before I started on the real thing.

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