Pony wall balustrade for staircase work

[Gene Davis]

Build a Chief stairs unit, specify no railings or newels.

Build right tight to the stairs, a pony wall, the bottom half solid, the top half a railing wall. Make the wall slope up to track the stairs. Edit the wall heights so the bottom half, the no-railing piece, covers the side of the stairs plus up about 2 inches. Edit the top railing section so the handrail is up at code height above the stairs.

Can this be done? See attached for examples.

[sutcac]

See my post on your other thread about the new Follow Stairs option for railings. But, I think the solid wall under will have to be done with a p-solid or something. I even tried locking the wall under and dragging a railing over it but Chief won't let it.

[Gene Davis]

It feels like the Goldilocks story. I do the ramp rail with shoe, don't raise it, and it is too low, then raise it, and it is too high.

I want my shoe rail to be the pony wall cap, a nice 2 inches above my stairs. But alas, it will not be.

Any kind of geometry other than z-linear used for a baluster in these ramp railings, gets skewed to the pitch, and looks distorted. Best to use simple cylinders or squares, or any "turned pattern" baluster.

I guess you can't have everything.

[dshall]

I want my shoe rail to be the pony wall cap, a nice 2 inches above my stairs. But alas, it will not be.

Select the stairs, closed stringer, and change the STAIR SPEC<STYLE<STRINGER TOP number, the only problem is you man not adjust the thickness of pony wall.

This may be what you are looking for, or maybe not.

[Gene Davis]

Thanks, Scott. This isn't going to do it for me.

I go closed stringers, and play with the stringer top setting, but it just moves the stringer top, independent of the shoe for the railing.

The shoe for the railing can be toggled between RAISE and unchecked for NO RAISE, but its position is either too low when NO RAISE, or too high when RAISED. This, at least for my design sense.

I was thinking through the ops in Chief, and the potential for doing, or coming close to, the last two staircases I modeled, for which I used Sketchup for part or all. I'm not there yet.