in the lab
getting down to it
Problem: My friend needs to carve solid blocks of oak into curved, twisting handrail sections in order to finish a staircase for a client. Ok. Here we go. After slogging through a sixty year old handbook written by a master Italian rail carver from San Francisco, making extremely accurate measurements of the staircase, studying everything I could on the internet about his system (called the tangent handrail method), brushing up on my plane and solid geometry, and drawing for four days straight, we ended up with this drawing on a full sheet of MDF (4 ft x 8 ft plus a little) which would (theoretically) accurately describe the three dimensional shape of a curved handrail if it were projected onto flat surface, like a block of wood.: So, ok, next we glued up a big ol hunk of MDF to practice our carving and test our layout on. The THM gives you a big crescent shape, called the face mold, and some accurate angles that will eventually create the twist in the section, which you can see ...
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