Hi again,

Just a thought… here’s a blog article that show’s a wreathed rail being built and moulded.

https://wooddesigner.org/how-t…..-3rd-part/

All the best,

Ness

Hi Scott,

Thanks for posting on the forum.

Sorry to reply so late but I’ve actually been away on holiday this last week, so just back to the office yesterday.

Milling wreathed profiles is a tricky problem.

I’ve never used nor seen working in real life the Scheer handrail moulder. It’s an expensive bit of kit and will require a specific router bit per profile.

The only video of this machine in use shows it milling a curved handrail:

I do the milling of curved rails on a spindle moulder with a curved guide, much faster and cleaner than the Scheer router.

In my opinion the Scheer router will work on slow twisted rails but as most of my projects include tight twists and often custom profiles I’ve never considered using this router.

The only other machine that I know of that specialises in this is this one:

This probably works faster but has the same limitations as the Scheer router.

In France where I live and work we have 2 machines that work well for this type of milling, the horizontal spindle and the portable spindle. These machines require some dexterity to use and can be very dangerous so not sure they meet all the safety standards in other countries and they probably don’t meet the French standards either….

The horizontal spindle moulder :

I personally use the safer portable spindle moulder or toupie Resch

:

Here’s a link to an article on our stair blog where you can see a couple of photos of me using this machine to build a wreathed rail:

https://wooddesigner.org/how-t…..ed-stairs/

By the way, you’ll find a lot of information on curved stair and handrails on this blog…

To keep the full length free for machining, I hold the wreath by screwing bolts into the under side and holding the screws in 2 tilting vices.

This rail is made using my laminated sections technique, a fast clean and simple way of making wreathed rails on metal rails, but the milling principle applies for any twisted form.

As these machines work with a small radius spindle that acts as the guide they can get into very tight curves. The only common situation where they can’t work is in a volute and in this case you have to sculpt free form by hand.

They also use flat cutters that I can make myself for any profile which makes them great for renovation work where every profile is different.

Of course today wreaths can be cut and milled on a 5 axis CNC but the programming is quite a headache.

I think that although CNC is great if you have several parts that are the same, it’s not adapted to renovation work where a stair might be need 20 parts all different with a specific profile to match an existing rail.

So these are my thoughts on this today. I hope that they are of interest to you.

Can you tell us a bit more about yourself and the work you do?

All the best,

Ness