NO SHOES! Staircase Balcony Install - How to Square Mortise Balcony Balusters 2

[Music] [Music] ah hey what's up guys welcome back to the channel getting going on a stair here and in this video we're going to go over how to square mortise balusters into your handrail and shoe rail using a square mortiser a hollow chisel mortiser so hope you enjoy the video not a lot of information out there on this topic typically in production settings you would see these little shoes used around balusters so that you could drill a round hole but we're going to really accentuate the the craftsmanship and go with square mortises on these balusters so this video will be about how to do a horizontal balcony rail there will also be another video going over how to do a rake handrail which involves using the tilt mechanism of the mortiser here so look for that also but let's dig right in and get started so we're up here at the the balcony and as you can see i've got my handrail and shoe rail in place those are not nailed off or installed they're just dry fit and i dry fit them because it helps square up the noodles whenever i set the noodles in pl it helps keep those kind of where they're supposed to be while they set up so i actually did this yesterday afternoon so everything should be pretty locked in here this morning but the hand rail shoe rail isn't loose and the first thing i need to do is mark out where i want my balusters to be located now the baluster that we have selected for this job is just a standard half inch by half inch iron baluster so that's pretty simple code dictates that these cannot be more than four inches apart i'm going to shoot for about three and a half inches of space between each baluster so i'll get my calculator out and figure out what my spacing needs to be so i get out my phone and open my construction master pro app i have 72 inches across so i'm going to just take 72 inches divided by four inches because that's going to give me three and a half inches of space between plus the half inch baluster three and a half plus a half inches four so that's going to give me 18 balusters approximately now i like to use an odd number on the balusters that way i can have one directly in the middle so i'm going to go with 17 times 0.5 since they're half inch wide equals 8 and a half inches so now i'll take 72 inches minus 8.5 equals and even though there's 17 balusters there's going to be 18 spaces so divide that by 18 equals three and a half inches exactly between each baluster so that's awesome we'll go with that now whenever it comes to ballast or layout there's a few things you're going to want i like to use tape that way i don't get pencil marks all over this oak it's a little bit harder to sandal the sand the pencil marks off oak than it is like poplar but putting some tape down is nice a laser for plumbing up my center line and then a nice quality compass you'll see what this is all about in a minute and then i like a double square also that helps mark the center line so now on this shoe rail my post to post post center width was 72 inches so again i like to use an odd number of balusters if i can just because then i can put a baluster right dead center and work in both directions and it's just easy so 36 inches is dead center i took my double square and i marked the center point of this shoe rail all along here just by using this double square and a pencil so i have the center line there now because my spacing between the balusters is three and a half inches my spacing center to center on the balusters is going to be four inches and that's where this comes in i'm going to take my compass and i'm going to use my tape measure and try and get this set so that point to point i'm exactly four inches apart so what i've got here i've got the center of my end baluster in the center of my middle baluster marked i'm just going to very lightly take the compass follow that center line and lay it off lightly and i'm not pushing these points in very hard at all i'm going to lay it off and make sure that i'm coming dead center on that line and if i'm not i'm just going to micro adjust this and then do it again until it's perfect this reduces a lot of the potential for mistakes so once i've got it perfect i'm going to push this has really sharp points on it so i'm going to start in the center i'm going to push hard and make a nice indentation in that wood on that center line same thing on the next one twist it around push hard leave that nice point push hard so this compass is a nice tool to have because most of the time you're not going to have a perfect even number between your posts it's going to be some odd number like 72 and 3 16 and your actual baluster spacing might be like 3 and 9 64. which you just can't do on a tape measure very well so using something like this really helps reduce errors and keeps things really perfect now if you don't have a compass like that there is a way to do that with your construction master pro app on your calculator and i'll show you that next [Music] so we have four inches center to center so all i do is hit four inches plus equals that doubled it to 8. now i hit equals now it's 12 equals 16. so you see it automatically adds four inches each time i hit that equals button so you can keep going along same thing if it was like three inches and five sixteenths some number that's really hard to do the math in your head just hit plus equals equals equals equals equals so you only have to hit the plus equals the first time and then it's just equals equals equals after that but i will say you'll find if you're using the calculator it's not going to be as precise you'll end up again you're going to get this act it might say it's 3 and 5 16 but it might be you know some really odd down to the 64th measurements you'll get to the end and it's going to be that 164th is going to compound over 20 balusters and you're going to end up with an odd space and that's why i like to use the compass so now at this point i've used my square to mark onto the handrail the center location i don't need to the center location running the length is not really important you'll see later i'm just marking across my centers also make sure on the end of the board you see r r for right side and then over here [Music] left l for left and then i also wrote wall that makes sure i don't get these flipped around and i know right where they go one thing i failed to mention whenever i pulled this one off a lot of times on your kneel post you'll have a wrap around the bottom so this shoe rail will end up being three quarters of an inch shorter than the handrail so if you take all this down you can't just put the ends you can't just line up the ends like this and expect it to work out and that's where it's nice to take your laser and just plumb up from your center here and mark your center here and then whenever you're laying out the rest of the balusters on this board start with those center lines lined up because you can also deal with issues with sometimes newer posts might not quite quite be plumb which will affect the length of the handrail versus the shoe rail so keep that in mind so you can see here i've taken down the handrail i flipped it over and just set it right down into place now i'm going to use my square to line up the center on the handrail and the center on the shoe rail and then work both ways marking with my square [Music] at this point all the baluster locations are marked out on the handrail on the shoe rail so i'm going to move take these pieces down to the mortiser and mortise out all these square holes now here's my piece of shoe rail here's my half inch baluster i want to set this up so that my mortiser is centered so what i like to do is rip a piece so five and a quarter minus a half inch four and three quarter divided by two two and three eighths so i like to rip a piece on the table saw two and three eighths and we'll come over here to the mortiser and as you can see i had this set up for handrail before so i'm gonna have to adjust the fence and get this bit centered so i'll take my scrap board two and three eighths i'll loosen my fence push it back drop the head down then i'll use my scrap piece and get that nice and snug then i can just tighten my fence [Applause] and now this will be centered at two and five-eighths right in the middle of my shoe rail now it's important to note whenever i centered this bit you notice i didn't pay any attention to if the fence was square to the base of the machine or not that's not important the important thing is that the fence is square to the bit and it's actually easy to get these square bits twisted so i use this piece to square the bit so whenever i drop this down i don't know if you can see it or not but i'm nice and snug on the back side and tight against my fence that tells me that the edge of this bit is running parallel with the fence which is really key if i wouldn't have ripped this piece and i just would have used my tape measure here to center it i wouldn't have been able to tell if that bit was square to the fence or not so that's why i like to rip these pieces like this now you see here i have my depth stop so that whenever i drop this down it's hitting that collar that's my depth stop since this is the shoe rail i like to go as deep as i can without going through the shoe rail so hopefully this depth will be pretty good for me so [Music] so [Music] so now that we've got these all square mortise a lot of times there will be some fuzzies on here so i like to hit them with the sander before i take them back up and put them into place got my shoe rail sanded now my hand rails are down here this is going to be the same process for centering the bit on the mortiser just deduct i got two and three quarter inch width on these handrails minus a half inch that's two and a quarter divided by two it's going to be an inch and an eighth piece to center my bit come over here drop my head down loosen my fence sorry about the bad camera work snug that up then lock down my fence and that's good to go now now because i am switching over to handrails i do have to adjust my depth stop again definitely don't want to be going all the way through the handrail so you can see the square chisel kind of tapers off up here so i set my stop so that it's about even with where that square chisel tapers off you can see it set right here so [Music] [Music] [Music] just wanted to take a quick second if you're learning and this is helping you in any way the way that you can help me is by visiting the links which i post in the notes with the video to the tools i'm using you see me using a unique tool there's a good chance i'm putting it in those notes and that's how it makes it worthwhile for me to do these videos your support is much appreciated visiting those links and of course you can always like and subscribe so thanks for that so now i've got my handrail and my shoe rail all mortised out and i'm getting ready to take those back up and the next step will be to cut a bunch of these balusters and i need to know what length i want to cut those and the best way to do that is going to be to know the space between my shoe rail and the bottom of the handrail and then add to that whatever the depth of my mortises are so i'm just going to take a couple scraps of baluster mark them with a pencil that way i can get a good idea on what the gate the depth of these mortises actually is same thing on the shoe rail i'll jam it in as far as it'll go mark the bottom and then i'll pull these out and measure whatever that is looks like it's about a half inch on both of them and i'll add that to the space between the bottom of the handrail on the top of the shoe rail and that'll be my baluster length so this now brings us to my iron baluster cutting station which consists of a metal cutting chop saw a jig that i made angle grinder for rounding over the ends yeah that's about it so i determined i need 37 balusters cut at 35 and a half inches so you'll see this is a really fast setup for knocking out a lot of ballast or cutting fast look for a different video going over tools for cutting iron balusters i'm not going to get in depth in this video but you'll see this is a pretty slick setup the way my jig is set up this is a stop block and all i have to do is line up the back side of this with my measurement so i want 35 and a half inches so we'll line up the back with 35 and a half inches lock it down and then i can just set my baluster on here bump it to my stop and that'll be the length i need [Applause] you'll notice i'm cutting off the pin end this is a rounded end and that's got to go for square mortises another important note i don't know if you can see this but there's a random hole here i have no idea what that is for you've got to make sure your mortise is deep enough to cover up that hole otherwise if your mortise isn't deep enough you need to cut off this end too [Music] [Music] foreign so all right guys so here we are this is the tricky part i've got my balusters cut and as you can see i've just dry fitted my handrail with two balusters on each end and i've got that down nice and secure where that's going to be in its final resting place what i need to do now is look ahead a couple steps at how i'm going to fasten this handrail to the newel posts there's different options with a thin handrail like this a rail bolt i'm i'm not a big fan of rail bolts not they're super strong but you have to plug them it's it i just feel like it's more work what i like to do is if i have enough space inside my newel post i like to screw from the inside with a screw like this and i'll get into that more in a second but with the rail in position it's really key because i'm going to take my pencil and i'm going to mark where that rail is gonna end up being and then i can know right where to drill my holes in the newel post and in the handrail so that i can use these screws from the inside with a right angle attachment like this dewalt here which i'll have in the link i'll have linked up in the notes but i really like to do that the other variable that i've got going on here is these handrails have a really bad dip in them so i was thinking ahead whenever i was cutting these i saw the dip and i made it so that the dip is down and what that's going to allow me to do is push i'm going to drop that handrail on there and i'm going to push down on both ends whenever i screw it and that's going to straighten that handrail out if i would have put the dip up there wouldn't have been any way to apply pressure to straighten that out so i'm also going to be dealing with that you can maybe see here my level you can see that that space under the level it's the gopro won't pick it up but it's a pretty nasty dip in this handrail to deal with so the next thing i do to prep to fasten these is i use one of these stubbies stubby bits in my right angle drill you can see in there i already drilled those two holes to connect this handrail so next i'm going to do these two others and try and show you guys [Music] so now you can see with having these holes drilled it goes through the null and into the handrail a little bit so that's automatically gonna line it up and get it where it needs to be whenever i put those screws in it's going to make things easier i want to take a second just to point out again this dip in the handrail how i'm taking that out now the other side of this handrail is screwed look right here see how that moves that's how much of a dip there is so i've got my lines if you can see them right there so i'll get that down into place and that's going to straighten this handrail out i'm getting ready to drop this next handrail onto these balusters and i want to point out a couple things that are really important about getting this hand rail to go on easily and without damaging the bottom of the handrail you'll notice the tops of these balusters are all rounded over i hit all these with the grinder and removing that sharp edge is really important it helps them slide into place a lot easier so i made sure on all of these that i rounded over their face up so that the hand drill goes down easier now the next thing you'll notice as i'm dropping this on you want to use an incline you can't drop it on with it perfectly level you want to have it tilted and then position each baluster one by one and your incline will go from like this to flattening out as you work your way along and get all the balusters in position so you see right here i've got these first few in place but then none of these are in place so i just have to keep dropping this down and moving these into position and it'll keep lowering as i go all right guys so there it is everything's installed as far as adhesive for your balusters you want to use something that can bond to metal or wood this e6100 works pretty well also you can just use regular old pl premium whatever you do you just want to use just the right amount so you don't make a huge mess [Music] i also wanted to show you on this handrail we completely took that dip out of it and it's nice and flat which is awesome so that worked really well [Music] you can see all my handrail connections are nice and tight very very solid using those screws definitely not going anywhere [Music] and then balusters are mortised in nice and tight so that'll be a really nice look so thanks for watching as always guys hopefully you enjoyed this video of how to do square mortise balusters on a balcony which is horizontal i also plan on doing a video on how to do them on a rake so look out for that video and then also how to just some tools and tips for production cutting iron balusters the saws the jig the grinder band saw kind of talking about how to do that in a productive way i'll have those videos coming also so stay tuned for that

Channel: Insider Carpentry - Spencer Lewis

Views: 63,309

Rating: 4.9666481 out of 5

Keywords: insider carpentry, finish carpentry, festool, diy, dewalt, staircase, baluster install, how to install stair, how to build stair, how to install balusters, metal balusters install, hollow chisel mortiser, hollow chisel tilt mortiser, square mortise balusters, spindle install, handrail install, bullet mortiser, chisel mortiser, square hole, how to make a square hole

Id: MWDVnuSncmk

Length: 26min 51sec (1611 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 30 2020