How to Make a Curved Railing (No Steam Required)

in this video I'm going to show you how to make this curved porch railing using a method that doesn't require you to use steam water heat you'll be able to use equipment that you most likely already have around your shop which would be a table saw pneumatic nail or screw gun with me about eight clamps and then what you're going to purchase to be some off-the-shelf railing two-by-four wood glue screws because this rail is for outdoors you know these are both pressure treated and I think that's it so here's how we're going to do it so this is our purchase rail this is the cross section we want to end up with what we're going to do is cut the sides off of this rail there will be a half inch to each we're also going to cut the 2x4 into half-inch thick strips and then we're going to reassemble those strips into our cross section using a jig and because these strips are easily bent we can bend each strip individually one at a time to the jig and then as we work our way out we're going to Gruen through those strips to each other and when we're done we'll be able to take it off the jig and it's going to hold its shape quite nicely with very little spring back all right so the first thing we need to do is build our jig and the first step and that is to determine the curvature of the inside of the rail and then to transfer that curve down on to the base that we'll be building the jig from now if you already have an existing railing or a template you're in great shape you'll just be able to throw that right down on your base and trace the inside of the rail for me I wasn't so fortunate so this next section I'm going to show you the method I used to determine the the radius of the inside of my rail and then how I transfer that radius down on to the base and if you already have a rail already have a template feel free to skip over this section but this next section is for us poor saps we've got to do it from scratch all right so this is the area we are making the railing for the first step is to determine the the radius that would be the inside of the railing so it's pretty straight forward so the first thing you want to do is measure the straight-line distance from the beginning of the curve to the end and again that would be on the inside so I'm measuring the distance from where I want my inside of my railing to start to where it's going to end for me that's about ninety seven inches and then the last piece of information is the distance from the middle of that line then up to the peak of the curve so for me that's 15 and a quarter inches you're going to run that through the equation for me that came out to a radius of 84 and three-quarter inches and then you're going to make a piece of string with a loop on each end so you see I've got a piece of string there so a loop on each end that is your radius which is flecked like I said for me is 84 and 3/4 inches all right so the last thing you want to do is go through all the trouble of making this railing and finding out that it's wrong that the curvature is wrong because you did the math wrong type the string the wrong length or you trust some guy in the internet so anyway so what we're going to do is we're going to double check make sure we've got our radius correct that because that determines everything so what we're going to do is what I did was I pounded a nail at the start of our curve another nail at the end of our curve and then I took the string that we made I hooked one end one loop through that nail put a pencil through the other end and then I I struck a line basically an arc where I thought the center point would be of the curvature and I did the other same thing here I hooked you know the loop end through that nail and then with a pencil through the loop on the other end you know I just struck another arc and where those arcs meet that intersection is the center point so then what I did was I took our string now I hook the loop over this nail and there was a pencil on the other end I basically struck an arc from start to finish and to me that looks pretty good alright so making the jig is pretty straightforward what I did was I took the string that we made but one end on the ground just with a screwdriver and then with the pencil scribed you see that their ice cribe the line our arc into two pieces of scrap plywood particle board that I joined together then I made seven of these L brackets and mounted them to the board so that the outside of the L lines up with the arc and the last thing I did let's took two pieces of our half inch strips this is going to be a starter strip and I just screwed these two pieces that a seam right here in the middle to the L brackets I made this jig about an a foot or so longer on each end so then when I'm done with my rail I've got material on the ends that I can just cut off to make sure I get it to the right length all right we're ready to get started we got our jig built to get all of our lumber cut you know the outside pieces we cut from the original rail the inside strips become from the two by fours one thing I did is because my rail is 11 foot long I had to and I use 8-foot two by fours for the strip's I'm going to have to use two two strips per layer and because I want to for strength I want to stagger the seeds I just went in sets of six foot and five foot pieces and seven foot and four foot pieces and I'm just going to stagger those sets as I built II and the layers out just for strength the staggered bussines so you start by putting down the first strip the first strip which isn't going to be the inside of the rail the inside is going to be is going to have the shape piece we've got to put that on after we take the rail off but the first first piece we're going to put down only with screws so we can take it off the jig and we're done we're going to start using glue as we as we go out from there I've got my screws we're going to screw this from the inside I've got my screws already in and I'm using 3/4 inch screws so it doesn't poke out of the strip I'm putting down and I've got it clamped in the middle we're just going to screw it down make sure you're even with the the top of your your jig okay now that we've got our first strip down we're going to build I'm going to go for more because I want two and a half inches in my inside layer and that's going to be capped with my half-inch shaped pieces that'll give me three and a half inch rail that's what I'm shooting for so my next four layers will be done a little bit differently we're going to put a bead of glue down first on the strip and then everything will be screwed from the outside in main thing is on the first first one I'm going to do need to make sure we use three quarter inch screws so we don't screw into the starter jig we won't be able to get the railing on after that we can use longer screws as we go out so we're gonna put the bead of glue down to clamp it now once we have it clamped pieces clamped together I'm going to go work my way down with this larger plan and just basically squeeze the services together the top to bottom try this even everything out or even you get these two surfaces less sanding you'll have to do afterwards I had a planer to run the screw that would be ideal I wouldn't really worry so much about it but I do not have that piece of equipment now that it's even just screw it in from the outside with the three-quarter inch screws all right so we've got that piece glued and screwed down we can take our clamps off we're basically going to do the same thing to all the other inside pieces you can use a long longer screws as you work your way out just make sure again you don't screw into the jig won't be able pull your rail from the jig and you're done the last piece of advice would just be have an idea where you're going to cut your rail to length and don't put the screw there so that's it let's let's finish the inside okay so we've finished assembling the five inside layers of our railing from the 1/2 inch strip we cut from the two by fours now we're moving on to attaching the outside shaped piece that we cut from our purchase rail we're going to use the exact same method we use for the strip's except a set of screws we're going to use number 18 Chuy's long nails and just a safety tip other than the safety glasses these number 18 nails do not travel in a straight line I've seen them hook and come out of the surface of the railing so just watch where you have your hand if I ever have a youtube video go viral I don't want it to be because I shot a nail through my hand so I'm gonna watch where I put my hand and yes so let's let's put the outside on okay so now we've got our outside piece assembled to the rail we're in the homestretch all that's left is to we're done with the jigs now we can remove the rail from the jig and then we will assemble the inside piece to the rail using glues and nails like we did with the outside and then just sand it even in smooth and we're done we'll have a rail okay so then I remove the rail from the jig it's sprung back maybe it happens to an inch on the ends maybe more glue more screws I did let this sit overnight before I remove it so the glue should have been driving maybe more screws with the help or maybe that's just the nature of this method so you might want to compensate for that if it's important to you for what I'm doing it's not going to be a big deal at all so next step is just to put on the put on the inside shaped piece okay there you go this is a final product after I put on the inside piece I sanded everything smooth then filled in all the cracks all the seams with a wood filler sanded everything again and as you can see as soon as I put a coat of paint on this it will look like a solid piece of wood which is exactly what we were shooting for you

Channel: Steve Porter

Views: 1,411,736

Rating: 4.6888323 out of 5

Keywords: Curved Railing, Bent Railing, Laminated Strips, Do It Yourself (Hobby)

Id: sgr8j15JP2U

Length: 15min 5sec (905 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 24 2015