Rail-ity check

Anyone who's done construction knows that stairs represent a building challenge far in excess of their ubiquity their mundane appearance: not only does one have to calculate spacings for perfectly consistent rise and run (your feet can perceive 1/16" differences in riser height, and trip hazards result if the you're off by 1/8"), but posts and rails take a lot of load without being naturally easy to brace.  Tom had patched the old stairs about five years before now, and had noted how shaky the rails were, even as short as the stair run had been. 

With the longer upper stair he determined that more posts equalled more strength, as detailed in a previous blog.  Here he's made the angle cut on the tops for the right side, and is about to secure the last post, that will hold the end of the handrail as well as link to the deck railing along the rose-bush side.

Getting the interstitial rails to fit without distracting gaps is a finicky task, and Tom spent the better part of an afternoon cutting these parallelograms so they would seat nicely within the plane of the posts, and provide good fastening surfaces for the vertical pickets that will grandkid-proof the stairs and satisfy code.  Clamping the stops and making sure everything is parallel and even requires patience and skill, as I discovered when I did the main steps at the Big House last fall.

Here's the top rail in place.  It's an interesting design dilemma: you want to have a rail that is relatively easy to grip, but you also want it to cover the top of the posts.  If you set a larger cap over the top the look is chunky and small hands can't grasp it.  We could rip a 2 x 6 and have a source for pickets with the off-cuts, and that would give us a little more coverage above the posts, but I'm not convinced.  We've made the stairs wide enough that we could hang an inboard handrail if that seemed like a good idea down the line.