Handrail Bracket Design
Shopping for handrail brackets was frustrating. I found two vastly different price points: $5 for unexciting circular brackets from Home Depot OR $50 brackets from companies like Linnea. The latter are nice, but $50 is quite expensive for a stock component. And I need 4 of them. This research motivated me to design them myself. Chalk a victory up to “build” in the “build versus buy” war. Of course to build them, I had to design them.
Brackets are not very complicated but they can be tricky because of the angles involved. This is especially true if you want to make a universally usable bracket. Every set of stairs has slightly different rise and run dimensions. So if you want a square, rectangle, or somehow plumb bracket, you need to know these dimensions ahead of time. Perhaps this is why there are no middle-of-the-road mass-produced brackets.
But besides the angle dictated by the rise/run ratio, there is really only one other critical dimension: the distance off the wall. Massachusetts building code states:
Handrails adjacent to a wall shall have a space of not less than 1 1/2 inch (38mm) between the wall and the handrails.
A inch and a half is not very much space. I’ve found that almost all manufacturers standardize on 2 3/4″ as the distance from the wall to the middle of the handrail. This is what I used. The other dimensions can be chosen by aesthetic. I chose these dimensions to match the steel handrail I designed along with James Gonzalez.
I designed the bracket in Google Sketchup and created this spec in Layout. Below is an image although I think the attached PDF shows it more clearly. (Once I figure out how to clean up .skp files, I’ll post that file too.)
Resources: