A contractor friend asked me if I could build Chippendale railings. I'd never heard of Chippendale railings, but Google turns up plenty of images. Here's a couple of examples I pulled off the web.
Chippendale1.jpg chippendale2.jpg
There are quite a few patterns for these railings, but they all involve lots of diagonal elements, and lots of joinery. To complicate this particular job, the post positions were established by the existing building, so the post-to-post dimensions were all different. This meant that I needed a pattern which I could adjust to any width without it looking stupid. Here's the pattern I chose. My width adjustment is simple truncation. Also notice that the central joints meet at 90 degrees, which makes joinery easier.
singlepanel.jpg
To build the panels, I made an assembly jig. In the pic below you can see the jig, with white panel parts loaded in it. The jig is a sheet of OSB with lots of blocks screwed into it to position the parts. The joints you see here are all loose-tenon, done with a Domino.
glued.jpg
Here's a pic of the 90 degree joints in glue-up. I used West Systems epoxy, thickened a bit with sanding dust. Notice that all the panel parts run long.
clamped.jpg
Here I'm trimming the panel edges with a track saw.
trimming.jpg
The next step, which I don't have a photo of, was to surround the panel with a frame, and screw through the frame into the end of each stick in the panel. I used more epoxy, and I plugged the screw heads in prep for paint. I made nine panels, all of them different widths. In all, there were 200 tenon joints and 300 screw joints, and it took me two weeks.
Here's a pic of one part of the completed project. I think it looks pretty cool.
overall.jpg