Anybody tried alternating balusters?

[Gene Davis]

Chief offers control of baluster spacing in railing walls, but not for the railings integral with stairs. Baluster spacing in those integral to stairs, relates to tread width. Spacing equals tread width divided by two.

I was wondering if some Chiefers have succeeded with doing alternating balusters in both stairs and walls, and would be willing to share or discuss the modeling methods used.

The attached pic, clipped from a stair parts seller's website, shows alternating balusters.

[Gene Davis]

It looks like, if you fiddle with the numbers a little, you can get alternating balusters in both railing walls and railings integral to stairs. See attached.

The key is in modeling both balusters, one type A and one type B, and making the PAIR of them as one millwork symbol.

For stairs at a 10" run, you would model your balusters on 5" centers (run divided by two) because Chief places two balusters per tread in a run of stairs. My example shows how a pair modeled NOT at half-run end up looking wrong.

The twin-baluster planks I modeled are each a 1x4 (3/4 x 3-1/2) and are spaced 1-3/4 apart, which I thought looked good for a railing wall run.

In the railing runs I used in this model, you can see how the spacing is not uniform, in that the pairs are placed such that the 1-3/4" is not maintained. Chief runs through a little calc to spread out balusters in a wall railing, and I've not discovered yet the secret of adjusting newel "spacing" so that the as-modeled-in-the-symbol spacing is maintained.

Perhaps you cannot have it both ways, for a wall. Everything will depend on your newel-to-newel space, and you'll have to do that calculation first, to get the baluster spacing and number.

I had a Palm Pilot once, but don't have it anymore. When I was building houses and making gallery railings and balustrades, I had a cool little app right in my Palm Pilot that ran the numbers for baluster spacing in walls like these.

I'll bet if I modeled ironwork balusters, one a simple two-twist, the other with a single centered open-cage twist, and paired them as a symbol, it would be easier to get acceptable results in stair-run railings and wall railings. The reason is that the overall width of the pair would be far less than my plank-with-keyhole pair of 1x4s.

[Gene Davis]

In the view shown here, a triplet of iron balusters repeats once for each tread. The total "width" of the group of three parts, imported as one symbol, is 7-11/16", and the spread between individual parts was done when modeling the group, to work with a 10" tread run, i.e., parts are spaced at 3.333 inches.

Since there is a newel at the first tread, Chief finds no space left for a baluster of 7-plus inches width, and so models none there. "Hand work" is necessary to place any additional balusters behind newels on starting steps, when doing an array such as this.