I had understood that the tricky part would be to form the lower surface – which means the surface under the handrail that we mostly don’t see. This was tricky because the flat steel bar that now worked as the handrail was curving in three dimensions and was super elevated, sometimes in the wrong way, in the bends. This steel bar had pre-drilled holes for the wooden handrail so it had to fit well.
After succeeding to form this lower surface I am planning to cut out the widths of the handrail using a large band saw. After that I will have three sides forming three sides of the handrail and all in perfect right angles to each other. I will now use the band saw and cut the fourth, meaning the top surface of the handrail. This would give me a handrail that followed the railing perfectly, but had a square cross section. The cross section I was looking for had a nice curved top surface and a waist with the narrowest part at the bottom. The cross section should look a little like an air balloon, but a little flatter. I was planning to do this curved upper surface and the waist with a handhold router. The bottom one first, piece by piece and the upper one when the entire handrail was finally fixed to the railing.
There are only a few problems that I have not solved. It is quite all right but a little risky to use a handhold router on a piece of wood that is not flat but is curving away – has a convex surface. If one is careful it will be all right and the router bit will cut with the same depth through the curve. To, on the other hand, use a hand hold router when the piece of wood is concave – is curving upwards, is both dangerous and difficult as the supporting plate of the router will loose contact with the wood except on the opposite edges and the cutting bit will cut shallower and shallower into the wood until it hovers over the wood if the curve is sharp enough. This would be a small problem on the top surface where the concave curves are few and with a large radius but an enormous problem on the bottom surface where they are many and have quite small radiuses.
Another problem I worry about is the joints between the sections. The have to fit perfectly and that is not easy as I mostly have no straight edges or right angles to measure from. The joint will mostly be everything but perpendicular in every direction. You can imagine the feeling to have made the section perfectly right and when you cut the ends to fit them together you have made it to short so you get a gap or get any of the angles right so the joint is not tight. It would be very unprofessional to have to use mastic to fill the gaps.
As I, when I write this, have not done it yet I do not know if I will solve these problems, but I have some ideas of how to do it. So, follow the story and see how it goes.
