Lee Burnett
In the last post, I showed you how to stain your wooden railings… and today we talk iron balusters. I’ll take one of these giant swirly staircases, installed in my foyer, please and thank you.
Any power tool with a metal cutting blade, like a jig saw (we use this one) or a reciprocating saw (this is the one we have.)
A drill with a bit like this Amazon links take you to my affiliate shop.
There’s a fun interactive tool on this site where you can play with different designs and decide what peels your banana. (Sometimes, decorating makes me overly dramatic, like a Shakespeare character shaking my fist at the sky and shouting at the moon.)
They’ll hide the old, larger holes where your wooden balusters used to live. See if you can spy all the Spiderman socks that somehow made it into the photos throughout this tutorial.
They’re usually around $3-5 for a simple baluster, and you’d pay extra for the swirly pieces, and for each knuckle and shoe.
Then you’ll need to drill the holes in the railing a little deeper.
This shows you how deep the holes are on our railings: approximately one man-pinky on the top and one or two man-finger-knuckles on the bottom. Andy used a block of wood to make a jig on his drill so he went same depth on all the lower railing holes.
Please note the emotional maturity required for me to restrain myself from making 6th-grade-boy-level jokes about drilling just the tip. Now set your baluster in the lower railing hole and stand it up so you can mark a good length to cut it. Then cut the baluster with a reciprocating saw or a jig saw that has a metal-cutting blade. Make it easier on yourself and build a little jig to hold them in place while you cut them.
This is just a scrap piece of plywood, with two other scrap boards screwed in on top, exactly far enough apart to fit one baluster between them, and another board clamped on top to hold it in place while he cut it. The little shoes are still loose at this point, so hold them up out of the way while you glue the baluster in.
(By the way, if you read any “real” instructions on how to install iron balusters, they’ll say that you should use epoxy glue. We found the epoxy glue to be messier and harder to use, plus it’s SCARILY PERMANENT. Hold the baluster straight for the 4.2 seconds it takes the glue to dry, then just use an allen wrench to tighten the shoes and knuckles in place…
As long as you didn’t accidentally install the upper shoe backwards. And you’d REWIND, take the baluster back out, fix the shoe and glue it all again. If you have any knuckles, same deal: just hold them in place and tighten the little screw with an allen wrench.
The way I wrote this makes it sound like there are a lot of steps, but it’s very simple and can be finished in a Saturday. Buy and cut your balusters, stick ’em in the railing, glue them, and tighten the shoes and/or knuckles into place.
