I read something Randy wrote a few weeks ago and decided to give it a try. It seems like lately I'm getting quite a few calls for welded railings. I have one to make right now which has 5 posts, an L-shaped railing.
I cut up a piece of old 3-1/2" square steel tube. I cut it into 5 pieces about
21-1/2" long. I deburred and knocked off the worst of the rust and ground down the old tacks etc so they'd sit flat and stably on the ground (on their sides). Then I took 5 old 1/2-13 square nuts which are flat on one side and semi-domed on the other, and put the flat side down on the middle of one side of each piece, and welded them on.I cut 5 12" pieces of 1/2-13 allthread and beveled the cut ends on the disk sander. These threaded into the welded nuts. Now I had feet with 1" threaded rod sticking straight up, as many feet as I have posts to do.
I bought a piece of 1-1/4" round acrylic rod and bandsawed it to get 10 1-1/4" long pieces. I took an old 1/2" drill bit and resharpened it to a 90 degree included angle (118 degrees is too much for plastic, 60 degrees is best but you can't do that on a Darex drill grinder). Then I chucked each piece of rod and drilled it axially in the lathe, so it wound up being like a big plastic bead with a 1/2" hole.
Then I used 20 nuts and put the plastic spacers by the bottom and top of each vertical threaded rod.
1-1/2" square steel tubing with .120" wall fits very nicely over 1-1/4" round rod. Now the feet can hold my legs vertical and I can clamp/tack/weld the railing together more easily with the legs vertical.The point of using plastic spacers on threaded rod is that if I need to make a different railing with round legs or square legs of a different dimension, I can now just make different plastic spacers. Plastic is very easy to cut & drill, and rems aren't that expensive.
I checked the first 3 legs I set. They are very close to perfectly vertial according to my little bullet level.
When it's time to store this stuff, I can very quickly unscrew the verticals and then everything will store much more compactly.
Think this one's going to work pretty well. Thanks, Randy Z!
Grant Erwin