Making Rails at Home

Making your own rails at home is easy and fun -- as long as we're talking about the rails in a window or door frame, not the ones in railroad track.  And we've seen parts of this process before.

It's been a while since I was working on new window frames for the 18, but since the Car Shop crew did such a great job of washing out the 453 canvas, it was agreed that I need to do some more window repairs for Frank's project, the Shaker Heights car.  

After disassembling a few of the window frames last year, I decided that for most of them only the bottom rail needs to be replaced.  The stiles and the top rails are generally still in good condition and only need repainting.  And because of the clever design, held together with vertical metal channels on both sides, the stiles do not extend all the way to the bottom the way they do on most windows, where the bottom ends typically start to rot.  The only power tools required for this project are a hand-held router and a table saw.

The main challenge with making the rails for this design is mortising out the places where the brass lift tabs go.  I made a frame for this purpose last year, which we've seen before.  Here's one of the blanks cut to size and fit into the frame.  The mortises go nearly all the way through the wood, so you have to set the router depth carefully.  And bench clamps have an infinite number of uses.

After everything is set up, the actual cutting takes less than a minute.

And the result is just what we wanted.

I had enough wood for two lower rails.  The workpieces have already been rabbetted on the table saw at the ends to fit into the channels.

And now the window can be put back together.  The glass is in place.  All that's left to do now is to drill the holes.

Screws are inserted to hold the entire assembly together.  This is the outside:

And the inside:

Of course, it still needs paint.  I don't want to try painting it here at home, so I'll take it out to the Museum.  We still need to figure out how to reproduce the mottled pattern on the inside surfaces, but otherwise it will soon be complete.