Thread: WIP recycle tallowood curved handrail, table and floor

This will be interesting. I'm watching

so first job was to rip and dress the tallowood strips for laminating.

we ripped 19mm thick tallowood in half on our panel saw when cut it finished it about 7.5mm.

after ripping we ran it thorugh our wide belt sander, on both faces, this finshed the strips to 6mm and a 120grit finsh, we ran both faces as tallowood natural oil's make it hard to glue so by having both faces clean it will give us good surface to glue to.

in all we needed about 250lm of 6mmn thick strips,

next step was the glue up,

the first job was screw spacer blocks onto the plasterbaord, these blocks represnt the offset between the back of the handrail and the gap between the wall where your hand goes.

for laminating we used a polyurthane adhesive, this has a good open time to allows us to work but is rock soild the next day, this glue is same as other "foaming wood glues".

the first strip to go on is 90mm wide this allows us to screw it to the spacer blocks, we then add layers of the 70mm wide strips, each strip is 100% covered with glue applied by a small roller.

to clamp the blanks up, i use 70x35mm pine that we drill a hole in top and bottom then with hex head bolts and a impact driver we tighten up the bolts thus clamping the blank tight,

we use blocks over tradditional "F" clamps as it provides a larger surface area to clamp and on this job we used 200 clamp blocks, to buy 200 clamps would have costs over $1000 just for cheap ones, the blocks and bolts only cost $150 we then used these same blocks & bolts the next week to clamp a round handrail to steel on another job.

Very interesting so far. Like the block clamps, very practical.

This one is worth following.

I'm not following Wongo, but the WIP.

"His men would follow him anywhere.......but only out of curiosity"

Interesting WIP.

Great WIP

Yep, interesting indeed!

thanks for the feedback guys, it was a nice job that lots of hours went into.

the next day after the glue had set we removed the clamp blocks and unscrewed the blanks,

once back at the factory we rough cut the blanks down to 60x60 on the panel saw,

when then had to setup the spindle moulder, we had a TCT knife grind for us, we use serrated back knives that fit in to one of our heads,

we had to make a custom guard and offset fence for the spindle molder out of plywood,

to run the stright lengths of handrail we used the power feeder, and ran them through the profile has a slight flat bottom which allows us to run it on the table of the molder.

the curved sections were run using a MDF bottom template with a guide bearing under the the cutter head on the spindle, the template was 12mm MDF nail to the curved blanks which was trimmed to curve using router with flush trim bit.

the handrail sections where passed through using the guide bearing / rub collar this is a free hand operation.

we then had to hand sand the handrail, all up there was about 30 meters to handsand, we started with 40g then ended at 120g before taking to site.

May I ask why you laminated the handrails rather than make them in solid timber? Will the finish obscure the laminations?

When you were doing the lamination glue up, how did you hold each lamination in place while glue was being applied to the next one - ? Pin nailer ?