My Modern Cable Railing Stair Disaster - How NOT to Set Metal Stair Posts

hey what's up guys and welcome back to the channel what you see here is gonna be not a how-to but how not to do video this handrail going up this rake was the biggest disaster that I've had in recent memory I had to actually redo this handrail and that drops three different times working with these metal posts really threw me off the first time have an intermediate post so you'll learn a lot from this video if you ever have to do this I hope you enjoy and I'll walk you through the process of how I screwed up three different times on this handrail I'm gonna start you off at the beginning of this trainwreck I had the right idea starting out I knew that cable railing was very finicky going up a rake and that you had to have your post perfectly positioned otherwise your cable rail would not pass through the holes properly and it wouldn't be straight whenever you cited down it from the top of the stair landing so I started off with a string line at my top post and my bottom post and I was gonna use that string line to line up the string with the holes on my intermediate post that way they would be perfectly positioned what I didn't know is I was making a deadly assumption I assumed that my handrail would be able to pass over the tops of all of these posts and they would be perfectly in plane and everything would work out to me it made sense that if my holes were lined up across the bottom I'd be able to plop my handrail right across the top of all these posts and everything would be good I knew I'd have to do a handrail drop on the top of the rake but I thought my to intermediate post and bottom post would be just fine this video starts on a Friday morning I had all my stair posts in positioned the way I thought they needed to be and they were in fact where they needed to be but I started in on my handrails not knowing what I had ahead of me started up on this balcony it was a pretty long run so I had to actually use three different sections and then on the very end of that run I just put a 45 degree miter on the end of that handrail knowing that I'd have to make a handrail drop for the rake that would tie into that so from here I'm thinking it's going to be pretty easy right I might even get cable installed today so I just plopped my handrail right on top of these three posts and I'm thinking the inspiration picture has a just a square cut off at the bottom for the handrail so that's pretty easy and I'll just clamp this handrail on to these posts I'll mark my top that way I can do my mitre drop assemble everything and then I'll be onto cable railing unfortunately that was not going to be the case and I had no idea what I was about to get into at this point but you can even see from this video clip that the handrails got a mighty large dip in it and I don't really know why I know I have my hand my intermediate post position where they needed to be with the string line and I know they're perfectly plumb but I have no idea what's going on and why this handrail has this huge dip in it whenever I clamp it down on these posts I'm thinking in my head I know that the bottom of all these posts are exactly where they need to be in order for this cable to run straight so I can't move those I guess that means I'll just have to move these intermediate posts out of plumb so that the handrail runs straight so I kept moving forward you can see here I've got these wood supports screwed into these intermediate posts and I actually have them out of plumb that was the only way that I could get this handrail to actually be straight I should have stopped and thought about it more but I just didn't see what was going on so I just kept pushing forward at this point I'm actually installing the handrail at a different angle than the stair rake and I didn't even realize it it was about one or two degrees off which was gonna be a disaster but you'll see I'll figure that out I had the mitre cut on the top of my hand rail for the handrail drop I started transferring the hardware onto the handrail that way I could plop it on top of these posts move along get my handrail drop done and be running cable through this maybe by the end of the day here I'm finalizing the handrail installed by finishing up my drop at the top of the stair it ended up taking me pretty much all day on a Friday I had to do these handrails and unfortunately I wasn't gonna get much cable rail done but getting this thing assembled and ready to maybe put some cable through this and see how she looks so five o'clock Friday afternoon I run a cable through the bottom of the rake in the top of the rake just to make sure it was good before I left for the weekend and it wasn't that it was really choppy across the top and I had no idea why so that's how I went in to the weekend and right now I'm gonna come back on Monday morning and start talking to you about what I figured out was actually going on so on it's Monday on Friday I ran all this hand rail and I was setting my post and how do you go about setting these intermediate posts so that they're perfectly in line so that your cable is perfectly straight to me rather than measuring and trying to position them where I think they should go I kind of gotten close to where I thought but then I ran the screen and I'm very carefully marked where those intersection points would be so that these intermediate posts would be perfectly placed where they needed to be I actually have my cable strung up here across the bottom and I'm pretty happy with it it's really close to being perfectly inline top post going through the holes on my intermediate posts down into the bottom post now this is the point on Friday where everything went wrong but I didn't know it on Friday but I was making a ton of mistakes because I fail to realize a very simple issue that was going to make my life very much for a while Friday I go to put my handrail across the top here imagine I've got my posts in and I have to do this mitre drop up top so I set my handrail across the top of these posts and then I notice that there is a if I pulled the handrail down while this post was plumb there was a big dip in the handrail I didn't know what was going on and it wasn't lining up where it needed to in my top post could not figure it out but I knew I needed my handrail to be straight I couldn't install it with a big dip in it so I actually ended up setting these two posts out of plumb slightly screwing the handrail on I got that in position and then I made my cuts up there for my mind return there's no cable in there but as you can see maybe right here my margin on this cable gets much larger as it comes down and what was happening is the pivot point so the spacing on these holes that this cable comes through is the same that balcony section is perfect the holes are perfectly in line with my intermediate posts but here I'm on a rake so this pivot point on the handrail is right here and then down here where the pivot point is it's set back farther okay see how my cable right here is plumb and then over here my bracket is set back further and then here Center of cable is basically plumb with this bracket well that's causing this space to be smaller here and then larger as it comes down I have to completely take this hand off and redo it and do something very different down here at the bottom so that when margin on the cable will stay the same but this was a major major learning experience for me it seems kind of ridiculous that I don't know I've just never there's nothing in there directions as far as rakes being different and I didn't think of it so I hope that everyone out there can learn from this experience that I'm having because this is probably in total I'm gonna end up costing me a whole day of labor so I actually called the company this morning just thinking like well surely this is a common thing that they encountered tried to explain what was going on and sure enough it is but not that there would be anything like published saying watch out for this situation but anyways so they sent me a sketch of what they want me to do so what this would do is it allow my handrail to sit down on these brackets so the brackets here on the intermediate posts would be angled just like so but then down here I would actually cut a mitre and then this would flatten out in the post would sit flat down on that bracket like so it would be fine right here but then I have this short section over here also and I'm gonna if I do that here I have to do it there so that's gonna make a weird thing where it comes up goes up and then flattens out just a very odd kind of deal the other option is I would add a 5/8 inch spacer block underneath this post and then I wouldn't I would leave this would look the same here and then there so I don't know what I'm gonna do I it's already nine o'clock on Monday morning again just wasting tons of is trying to get this dialed in if it wasn't have been for these intermediate posts I would have been all done with this a long time ago but I guess I'll just have to think it through and roll with the punches so now the first thing that I have to do is drill out all these plugs get the screws out when I use Hyper adhesive because of how much force there is whenever these cables tension I wanted this to be really strong so it's not just gonna come apart with a whack it's pretty much indestructible so I'm gonna have to cut this miter right here and take the whole thing off and redo it made cut number one with the juice now I'll make cut number two right here and try to with the HK see so I now have the handrail where it's supposed to be and I also tensioned the cable that way I can sight straight down it and see and ensure that it's actually straight where it's supposed to be now to get my handrail where I need it to be I've got three and five-eighths to that cable with this bottom place I had to add a 7/8 inch spacer block to the top of these intermediate posts to get it so that I have the same space between this cable in the handrail the whole way up what I'm gonna do now is I'm gonna mark and I'm gonna put a block on this the underside of this handrail where it's gonna have to screw in so that it is shimmed up where it needs to be so I'll take this handrail down nothing I don't have to cut anything down there but I'll just I'll have to put a clean cut right here and then I can redo this whole return at the proper height now it was you can see I've got the same space top-to-bottom between my handrail and the cable rail but in order to achieve that I had to put a 7/8 inch thick spacer block under each of these intermediate posts that spacer block is necessary because that pivot point is right here in line with the cable and over here it's offset so it just throws everything off huge amount of lessons learned for me on this install but I'm glad this handrails finally done and I can get to installing the cable as you can see here by this video that is not what ended up happening I sat down and ate lunch and realized it just didn't look good and also I had issues on that small rake section on the opposite side of the stair so for the third time I set in to redo everything well here we go again I'm getting ready to take the hand drill down for the third time to try and fix this correctly the way it should be done realized I couldn't make it work over here the way I had it here with these blocks holding it up the only way to make this section correct is to have a returned piece come across flat and then go up reason is your pivot point for the handrail meaning this point right here has to be in the same position on both treads that means that your hole where the cable is gonna come out is going to be inside here and then opposite inside here therefore it's going to be really low coming out here and going up higher here so I'm going to have like an inch different space right here on my cables which obviously I can't make that work and I need to have my handrail on the same angle as the stairs and this handrail so everything is coming apart again I'm gonna try and do it right this time all right guys well it's about 3:30 in the afternoon and third time doing this handrail I've got it where it needs to be finally the key was this flat return that brings the handrail in plane at the proper pivot point right there to follow the handrail the issue again is your holes are on the inside of the post here inside of the post here so if you would run your handrail across and over the top straight over the top like I had it before that's your rake line but then you move your your pivot point for your cable rails inside both of these posts and that completely changes the angle of everything and it doesn't work so that dumb little thing right there is the key to getting this whole thing right definitely a huge learning lesson for the future I'll have a lot better grasp on what to do but this was definitely not fun but it's where it needs to be so I'm going to go ahead and start stringing cables through and try and get this thing done it was actually almost kind of depressing how fast the cables installed after I finally got my handrail right the cables go in pretty quick but this was a big learning experience with these metal posts it's a whole different ballgame with wood posts whenever you're drilling your own holes and you can adjust the height of your post and things with these metal posts with pre-drilled holes everything is so fixed everything has to be perfectly in plane as you're installing things otherwise the cables will look terrible so learned a lot of lessons on this I hope it helps other guys out who will do an install like this I'm really glad that I stuck it through to the end I wasn't happy with my second solution with having the blocks under the handrails but having fought through it and seeing it at the end and it is still satisfying and sometimes just happen [Music] [Music]

Channel: Insider Carpentry - Spencer Lewis

Views: 186,329

Rating: 4.9012208 out of 5

Keywords: insider carpentry, finish carpentry, festool, diy, dewalt, cable bullet, cable railing, metal posts, steel posts, steel stair posts, metal stair posts, cable staircase, modern staircase, how to stairs

Id: Sg2Igmoldwo

Length: 19min 22sec (1162 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 27 2019