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Curveballs in a small fabricating shop

Completed railing after cleanup.

Ours is a small shop, and we try to keep diverse work and customers. This keeps us on our toes and allows us to apply knowledge learned from one job to the next. Doing the same thing day in and day out gets old anyway.

We have curveballs thrown at us, and it may be several months or years between them. Recently we had our chance to hit a curveball when a job showed up for a local convenient store that was doing a major overhaul. It came in the form of a 55-foot curved handrail and had to be completed pretty snappy for a grand opening.

If this was a 55-ft. straight handrail, it would have been an easy hit. Cut your tubing and your pickets, lay it all in a jig on a large table, and boom, tack it and weld it. There’s a little more involved than that, but not much. Instead, this was an elliptically curved handrail. There was no constant radius or accurate concrete blueprint to build from. The railing would go around a curved outdoor dining area that a concrete crew had just made look nice.

We were going to have to make an extremely long template. This is where all those old large cardboard pieces that come on skids from steel suppliers would come in handy.

A couple of guys went out to the job to measure and then make the template with plenty of cardboard on hand. I wasn’t with them, but the look on their faces when they got back led me to believe that they had their work cut out for them. They were looking forward to anything besides this handrail. But it had to be done, so they started tackling it.

Remember, our shop is relatively small, so having a 55-ft. template laid out took up plenty of real estate. I actually kind of laughed when I saw it on the floor in the shop.

I knew that Nick Trueheart and Randy Davis were going to have to use our Tauring CNC angle roller to complete the job. It is a great machine, but when you use it only every two to three months, you kinda have to relearn quite a bit. The notes are getting better, so the job got off to a quick start, and the material was beginning to be rolled.

We decided to make the railing in four different sections and get the curve as close as possible to each section of the template. Nick and Randy rolled one stick and put it on the floor next to the jig to test it so they would know how much to “creep up” on the radius. The sticks were rolled one after another so they would be the same on the top and bottom after the adjustments were made. After a lot of trial and error, the sections had a nice curve that matched the template.

Since they were curved, the sections had to be assembled standing up. The pickets were individually tacked in place with a simple spacer jig. We basically had two guys tacking the sections together and one welding them to keep the job flowing. Fabricating a straight rail would have taken one-tenth of the time it took to make this one.

After a couple days of fab work, the sections were ready to be put together for a true test matched against the template. We went with a bolted-together assembly to make the final install go faster in the field. Because of space constraints, this mock assembly was done outside and, overall, the whole rail came out extremely close to as planned. One section had to be trimmed by several inches, but after some grinding and nice, smooth powder coating, this correction was unnoticeable.

Dropping the railing post into place.

Install day came on one of the hottest days of the year so far. We sent a guy out early with the template so he could dig postholes at the correct locations. Our small five-man crew completed the job in about two hours. They ended up using ratchet straps tied to permanent outdoor tables for support while the posts set in the concrete.

The bolted assembly was held together by ⅜-in. socket, flat-head bolts. After the concrete set, the railing wasn’t going anywhere. It was pretty beefy with 1.5-in. square tubing with 3/16-in. wall and ⅝-in. solid square stock pickets. The dark bronze paint really set it off and gave quite a bit of character to the outdoor dining area.

Handrails are something that a lot of shops tend to dabble in from time to time. Some focus primarily on jobs like this, but not us. You learn from every job, especially curveballs like this one.

In the end, this turned out to be a really nice job. The railing will be around for a very long time, and it is something that will be noticed by everyone in its vicinity.

All images courtesy of Barnes MetalCrafters.
About the Author
Barnes MetalCrafters

Nick Martin

2121 Industrial Park Drive SE

Wilson, NC, 27893

252-291-0925