Replicated Porch Balusters on Curved Railing
R.L. of Hurley, WI writes “We finished up the railing at Le Chatteau. The spindles and railings turned out great! Everything fit perfectly. Just wanted to ask if you keep a record of the spindle profile for future use? The Chateau has a second floor with railings around three of the four sides. They may have them changed in the near future. Thanks again for helping us with this project.”
We keep all the profiles for customer spindles (turned balusters) on file here at American Porch. We run into many situations like this where the customer needs additional replicated porch balusters for future projects. For each custom reproduction spindle we make, we make a CAD drawing. And on each drawing are drawn tool paths for the CNC lathe to follow. All of this information is saved for future use. And, unless you specifically request that the original be returned, we keep the originals here for a cross-check on subsequent projects. In this way, we are able to make the replicated porch balusters to the exact specification, whenever more are needed.
Also note the use of curved rail on this project. Even though custom spindles were used, they chose to use our standard 6″ class 4-piece Porch Rail System for their balustrade. This is actually fairly common. Our standard rail profile is a very well designed system that is architecturally correct, easy to install, efficient to make (and there fore cost-effective), and oh yeah, beautiful. Often times customers that opt to have us recreate their original turned baluster designs end up using our standard rail profiles.
For instructions and information on how to measure for your curved porch railing, see our Curved Porch Railing Article.
For information on how to get started with your own Replicated Porch Balusters, see our Custom Porch Baluster Restorations page.