Sweep stair rail, Spring '00

This was a rather odd project involving a house in Las Vegas.

The general contractor flew me and 5 other subcontractors to Las Vegas to work on this house on a golf course inside a double gated community.

I had to ship a 700 lb. crate of tools and equipment via truck freight to the house, and then source all the materials locally. I took my inverter welder on the plane with me as checked baggage.

We lived in the house while working and only went out for food and supplies.

I rented gas bottles in Las Vegas. The rail was made from components from Indital, an Italian supplier of hand forged railing pieces. I rolled the cap bar on site using a roller of my own design.

The railing had to fit the parabolic curve of the stair case.

The spiral newel post was built off the wood volute. A volute is a wooden spiral.

I took a digital photo of the volute and imported that into a laptop on site. I drew a vector drawing of the volute in a CAD program by overlaying the photo and scaling to match. A CAD drawing of the needed steel spiral was then created from this. I emailed the CAD drawing to a waterjet shop at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway and had them cut 2 of them. One became the bottom and the other the top.

I never got final pictures since the General Contractor and Homeowner had a falling out later.

I think it turned out well, though.