Handrail time

As well as spending a few days banging my head on a variety of well built baseboard bits under my friends layout, I've also spend some time at my bench, and as usual, its back to the Ed's again, as I would really like to get them 'finished' in the not too distant future.

I had been avoiding a few detail jobs on the ends. the first up was the front door surrounds. I cut a piece of paper to size and then carefully cut out the inside with a sharp knife to give a retangle with lines about 0.5mm wide. This was then glued into position with PVA.

Next up was the handrails. faced with having to bend multiple numbers of these to size i came up with a small jig. I used an iron spanner that came from one of those flat packed warehouse furniture kits. using a hacksaw I cut in to both sides until the center bit remaining was the right length to fold up the hand rails.

It was a relatively simple task to bend one end of the wire with pliers, then fit it into the jig and bend to the correct length. To cut to the correct length I used a triangular file to cut is off on the other side. pliers bend the second end to the correct angle, and there you have it. as you can see from the jig there are 2 different length handrails. These were the vertical ones. For the horizontal ones I just cut some wire to length and then glued it in place. It looks OK from 2'.