Stair Parts

A prefinished Tigerwood order went through our process this week and it stopped everyone in their tracks.  The office staff and the craftsmen were amazed at how beautiful the tigerwood is when it is finished with a clear finish.  The order had newels, treads and a platform and all of them had incredible character.  The tigerwood had ray flecks, stripes, mixes of browns that are amazing to see.   If you have a stairway that needs a unique look, tigerwood treads, newels and handrails is your best choice.

Stairsupplies has been prefinishing stair parts consistently for the past several months with the assistance of our neighbors spray booth.  Now we have our own spray booth completed and we will be able to start spraying treads, handrail and other stair parts ourselves.  We have done a lot of research and testing with the use of our neighbor’s booth on the best finish for stair parts.  We have found a finish that is environmentally friendly and very durable.  The look is great also.  So what is the trade-off.  Obviously the finish is more expensive than other finishes.  We have decided it is worth it.

For the past month we have worked to improve our box newel cell.  The improvements involve a move to a new building with more space and dedicated machines.  When the box newel cell is completed the cell will be able to go from raw lumber to a completed box newel in about 3 hours.  In my next post about box newels I hope to show pictures and give more updates on the progress.

Really tight radius curved stairs are difficult for bending handrail.  Recently we had a very short, but extremely aggressive bend in a stairway where we helped the customer install the handrail.  To achieve the tight bend we did a process of moistening and pre-bending the handrail.  Because of the extreme amount of moisture that we applied to the handrail we used Titebond 3 glue to be certain we had a waterproof glue hold.  We pre-bent the handrail by successively bending the handrail farther into the radius over a period of 2 days.  We pre-bent the handrail even farther than the final radius which reduced the spring back when we finally glued the handrail