Spindel & Newel Post Fabrication
Spindel & Newel Post Fabrication The summer of 2002 begins with a new exterior paint job; however, there are several areas where rot has set in and those need to be repaired prior to painting. One of the worst is the front steps leading into the house. Here's what the steps looked like before:
What's not shown clearly in the photo is that all the square spindle bottoms and the left side of the stair treads are rotton from water damamge over the years. Rather than just replace these with new square posts, we looked at a photo of the home shortly after it was built and asked what it would take to replicate the original look.
The answer appears to be a lathe, some 2+" thick stock and elbow grease. We began looking for the wood. I thought this would be the easy part; however, try to find 2" thick douglas fir or the like...not an easy task, and if you can find it, you probably can't afford it. Then we got a little lucky, a good friend who salvages old homes had recently salvaged an old church roof made out of solid 3+" thick cedar. He has thousands of board feet, but we only need 60 or os. Here's what the church ceiling material looks like right from the salvage yard.
After removing roofing nails and residual tar paper, the cedar in planed to a final thickness of two inches and then ripped and cross-cut to form the spindel blanks for lathing. There are quite a few knots and many nail holes, but hopefully I can work around or through these with acceptable results.
Now it's on the turning spindels which will match the originals. On this day, I have a an extra hand...my boss, Mike, from Cray. He's an expert machinest and is helping me set up the lathe duplicator. His real motivation for being here may, however, be to get me back to work sooner (thanks for your patience Mike).
Mike begins the process by aligning the duplicator to the turning stock. This is accomplished by turning a long piece until the diameter throughout the stock is equal. If the duplicator is misalligned, the thickness will vary throughout the piece.
Next the depth of the cutting hed is adjusted so that thickness of the spindel matches the thickness of the pattern piece.
Finally we were off to the production line, or so we thought, but the process didn't go quite so smoothly (literally) at first.
There were several things to learn about using the duplicator. First, at a critical depth (usually about where the beads start to form for these columns) the spindel starts to chatter. We tried adjusting the spindle speed and cutting depth, but those had no significant effect. Finally we resorted to putting on leather gloves and stabilizing the spindle with our hands. This worked good enough to get out the few number of parts we need; however, I would consider purchasing a dedicated stabilizer if I were to do alot of these. The next problem was that the cedar tends to tear out quite a bit. If I use a sharp gouge and turn these the old fashion way, the tearout is minimal, but I have a hard time getting each spindle to perfectly match. Despite our best efforts to sharpen the duplicator point, tear-out still occurred. Fortunately, the cedar sands smooth very quickly, so we added sanding to the process flow. Here's the result after making both corrections:
Even though I could get just as nice of results with a sharp turning gouge, I really had a difficult time getting each spindle to be the same. With the duplicator, this was not a problem at all. For the newel posts, I used conventional turning techniques as minor variations between the newel posts will be difficult to pick up on as they are spaced far apart. Here's what the stairs look like before painting:
