Thread: stainless steel wire balustrade in wooden Posts

Use the Stainless posts. Whatever you do to timber, it remains a natural material and will give with constant stress - however you brace it. Your wires will get all saggy, specially if you have kids who will stand on the wires. You can always face the steel posts with timber and have a timber rail as the top rail.

My neighbour has put in stainless steel balustrading and it has worked out fine, however you must have a hand rail on the top with good fixings at the bottom of the posts to stop movement. Make sure the handrail is of a decent size to resist flex.

In order to deal with sagging over time, install with turnbuckles that give you a good 30 to 40 mm to play with, and tighten once a year. You can have it tight enough to not sag, but with timber you cant have it as tight as steel, ie so doesnt sag when a 4 year old stands on it - for this reason it may not pass council regs if over 3m, because the 125mm gap can be enlargened easily (while one child stands on it the other goose sticks there head in! LOL!). As you can imagine, all the stress is at each end so anything you can do to reduce the load at the ends will help.

We did this in our extension - timber posts and stainless wires around our deck. Worked well.

All the points above are relevant - make sure you get the tensioners put on each wire as the wire will sag over time - this is true to some degree of the stainless posts as well - friends cables have sagged over time and the whole fitout is stainless.

Looks good once finished!

Geoff

soey22,

Ive just ordered my balustading kit to put on my deck.. mirrored stainless steel post (3.00mm heavy duty), flanged so that they bolt straight onto the deck..I need about 15 LM of balustrading at a cost of nearly 5k. There is a fair bit of tension that is required to be put on the wired to be compliant with Aussie standards..

Originally Posted by stelaras

Ive just ordered my balustading kit to put on my deck.. mirrored stainless steel post (3.00mm heavy duty), flanged so that they bolt straight onto the deck.

Hope you have got something very substantial to bolt posts into, like 150mm min of concrete. Don't even think about fixing flanged posts to decking boards. I would even be very cautious about bolting through decking boards to get to joists etc as any shrinkage in the boards will allow movement under the flanges and a loss of tension.

Timber posts are fine with stainless cable so long as you build your deck correctly which unfortunately most dont... The posts are best on the corners to run from the footing through the bearer and up to the handrail... your top rail is best fixed down with 100mm bugel batten screws or 100mm decktites ... You should always put an infill under your top rail that goes tight between each post to eliminate the chance of compression flex from the cable tension.. this takes the stress off the top rail fixings and is where most come undone.. posts need to be a min of 90mm

check out these guys for your cable requirements as they will give the retail customer a trade price posted to your door

"Miami Stanless" they come up easy just google it as i am to lasy to look for a link (sorry) They also have the legal requirements for stainless cable handrails on there site so read up first as most people under do the cable requirements

cheers utemad

Also dont run your cables around corners ... pay the extra and buy another set of tensioners and start again fresh always in a straight line only

cheers utemad