Square Mortising Hardwood Treads, Iron Baluster Installation, and Handrail Installation

hey what's up everybody spencer here welcome back to the channel in this video we're going to dig into square mortising for balusters on hardwood treads so essentially we're going to be creating a square mortise for the balusters to go directly into and thus not need a baluster shoe at the bottom it's going to be a really nice clean look and then we'll also talk about how to cut your balusters install them and then drop your handrail into place to finish off the staircase so a lot of good stuff in this episode hope you guys enjoy don't forget to drop a comment let me know what you think in the comments section and we'll dig right into it i just used my hyper gun and went ahead and permanently attached these miter drops or goosenecks whatever you want to call them so i'm gonna get just let these sit here and set up for a while and then we can go over here and start doing the mortises on the treads and for that all you need is a half inch forstner bit that's nice and sharp your drill and just a uh a random half inch hollow chisel mortise i don't even know what you call this uh the hollow chisel part of the bit you would use on the mortiser uh it's got no auger bit in it um all you're going to do is just get it into place after you drill the half inch hole and then hammer it down and that creates a square mortise so that's what we're going to do next now whenever it comes to drilling your holes you're going to use the forstner bit make sure it's a half inch obviously that would be horrible if you drilled a bunch of holes and it wasn't a half inch hole but then the next question is how deep do you want to go my treads are an inch thick and i don't want to get so deep that i could potentially go through that but i mean all you really would have to go is a quarter inch deep you don't have to go really deep but the thing you find is the deeper you go the more these will want to stand upright whenever you're installing them and keep them keep in mind in a little bit we're going to have to try and drop this handrail onto these and get these all into place so the less they're flopping around all over the better now with these balusters in particular they're a half inch square but they're a little bit undersized which gives them a little bit i mean they're just loose that's all there is to it they don't look bad but they definitely don't stand upright so in my opinion i would try to go as deep as you can because it is going to help keep them as close to plum as possible because if they're just really flapping all over the place it's a real nightmare whenever you're trying to put that handrail on so for drilling these holes you're going to want to look for a point to stop your depth and in my case i'm going to stop it right at the top of this black uh on the shaft of the bit here so you want to keep your depth consistent the whole way up and that will be really important later whenever you're taking measurements to have that consistent depth on your bit so all i'm going to do is line up the point on my forstner bit with the center mark that i made earlier whenever you're mortising these holes it's really important that you keep the drill as perfectly plumb as possible whenever you're drilling these and i've showed this before in other videos but i have a bubble installed on my drill that really helps if i need to i can look at the top of the drill and get that bubble dead center and helps keep things plump the reason it's really crucial is because whenever you hammer this chisel down it's going to follow that hole it's not going to make its own way it's going to perfectly follow that hole so if you're going in at an angle then it's going to make so your your baluster is going to be at an angle and that's no good after my holes are drilled i'm going to take my mortising bit chisel i should say and you want to get that thing centered on that hole so that you don't see any of the hole outside of that chisel on any side and then just square it up hold it that's it now the real key that i want to stress with lining this up is get your head right over the top of this that way you can see all four sides and you can see if there's any gap of that hole around the chisel and if you're not if there's not you know you've got it centered and then the next thing is just simply take your square and make sure it's squared up usually you can get it really close just by touch and feel but then that square just ensures that you're right where you need to be be careful not to bump it gently touch it give it a couple little taps just to get it set then drive it home now you notice this it actually went in at a bit of an angle sometimes the grain will carry it in one direction and if that happens just take it out and then go back and you can just lightly shave a little bit off of that other side that was giving you the trouble by making a second pass like so [Applause] there really isn't much to this it's not rocket science it's just a matter of taking your time and doing it right make sure everything's lined up before you go to town on it and make sure you've got a sharp chisel and it goes pretty well and here you have everything all finished up and square mortised on the treads i'm going to go ahead and leave the tape on the treads until after the balusters are installed to help protect that raw wood from adhesive so that's it for mortising the holes in the tread uh all you need is your forstner bit chisel and uh something to unplug the chisel combo square and the old stiletto hammer so it doesn't really take much tool wise to do this on the treads so next step is going to be to put the handrails back in place that way i can measure for the balusters and then i'll cut the balusters put them in and we'll drop the handrail on there are all kinds of tricks for holding handrails in place without fasteners but clamps always work great you can see there's a combination of techniques being used here and one of my favorites is here at the bottom which is to use your triangle square with a clamp that helps keep things level now before i can get carried away measuring for these balusters i'm going to measure from the point of my handrail down to the top of the tread but then i'm going to need to add additional height to the baluster to account for the depth of the mortise so to get that i need to just take a scrap piece of baluster and insert it into the mortise and i'm going to mark that with my pencil and that's going to tell me how much i need to add maybe just go into a couple of them and double check make sure they're all consistent they should be because we use the depth stop on the mortiser so these rake balusters should be pretty consistent which they were now i'll come down here to my treads i'm just going to take this stick it in the mortise mark the bottom you can see these it got a little bit they're looser hammering them in tends to uh do that [Music] but now i can take whatever that is and whatever that is and add it to my measurement and that will tell me what i need i've actually got 7 16 here and a half inch here so that's 15 16 close enough to an inch so i'll just measure from here up to this point right here and add an inch and that'll be my baluster lengths for the sake of not letting this video get too long i'm not going to get into metal cutting balusters a whole lot here this is my setup works really good and that's about all i'm going to say about that on this video look for other videos to get more information on this setup it is finally time for the moment of truth the moment where we find out if we've done everything previously correctly or not if we have the handrail will go in like butter if we haven't it'll turn into a living nightmare the adhesive i'm using here is pl premium i have another adhesive i use sometimes but it was apparently too old and was not usable so trusty pl on this job now i'm just putting them the balusters into place and then give them some good taps with the hammer and it'll be time to drop the handrail on now the trick to this is you want to start at the bottom and keep a steeper angle on the handrail and as you go up you put the balusters into position and the angle of that handrail will continue to drop as you put one baluster after another after another into place and while that one went in really smooth can't even talk fast enough let's see that again from a different angle that way i can give a little bit more commentary on this it actually is pretty difficult to do this um one of the key things is on the tops of your balusters you want to hit all those with a grinder and round them over a little bit and that makes them slide into the mortises on the rail so much nicer another note you'll see here a lot of these balusters are flapping all over the place that's what i was talking about previously on getting a nice deep mortise on your treads that way these stand up as close to plumb as possible the other key thing is having really consistent measurements whenever you cut your balusters if you cut them consistently then it's really easy to move from one baluster to the next one and you see my gopro is about to fall over but um that made this handrail go in really easily and there went the gopro no one ever said being a stair builder and a youtuber would be easy and that is certainly the case here as you can see i just couldn't win it fell over again to secure the handrails to the nulls i'm using one of my favorite things ever and that is the compact right angle attachment attachment that is impact ready and some grk screws that are the perfect length to go inside of a newel post works really really well check out the video i did on the balcony handrail i get more in depth on this method in that video now on this top section of handrail you're about to see what happens when things don't go perfectly for some odd reason i decided to cut one of these balusters 3 8 of an inch longer than i should have and it was not allowing me to drop this handrail into place i was able to figure out which baluster it was take it down and cut it and then everything went in well but one little mistake on dropping these handrails into place can really turn it into a nightmare and i just struggled a lot more with this one because for whatever reason i didn't have quite the accuracy that i did on that lower portion of handrail as you can see here i was eventually able to identify which baluster wasn't cut correctly took it down and cut it brought it back up had to lift the whole thing back up again to get that lower baluster in and then it all went in pretty well hope you guys enjoyed this video that's going to be it for this one it got a little longer than i anticipated but hopefully you found it beneficial and helpful don't forget to like and subscribe you can support me by purchasing tools via the links that i provide in the video notes i get a kickbox kick back from amazon for that and it doesn't cost you anything and it helps me out a lot so thanks for watching and we'll see you on the next video

Channel: Insider Carpentry - Spencer Lewis

Views: 64,261

Rating: 4.9586921 out of 5

Keywords: insider carpentry, finish carpentry, festool, diy, dewalt

Id: bnIcgFxIqXo

Length: 14min 15sec (855 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 20 2020