Ipe railing systems?

[Roy Smith]

I'm looking at Ipe to build about 60 feet of deck railing. My lumberyard has 1-1/2 x 1-1/2 milled verticals, 4x4 posts, and an assortment of milled pieces which are obviously meant for the top and bottom rails.

The problem is, while it's clear that they are designed as a system, I couldn't quite figure out how it all goes together. There were two different sizes of milled toprail (I'm looking at the smaller one, about

3-1/3" wide, for $6/lf!) but it had a channel milled into the bottom which was much too wide for the uprights. There were some other pieces with milled channels that were a perfect fit for the uprights, but no obvious way to attach to the top rail.

Nobody at the yard seemed to know much about it, and I couldn't find any literature. Is there some standard system for how all this stuff goes together, or does each mill come up with their own design?

My contractor is pushing me to go with a white vinyl railing system. It's not bad, as long as you don't care what it looks like :-)

[J. Clarke]

You might fine to be helpful.

[Roy Smith]

Thanks -- that does help.

[Mark Blum]

I built a railing for my ipe deck out of standard 1x6 decking material. I didn't feel like paying such high prices for the various milled pieces. Since I was able to get a great deal on the standard decking material (surplus from a firm that installed it as flooring in semi trailers), I just bought enough extra to make railing parts.

I ran each piece of decking through my drum sander to get good mating surfaces, then glued the planking into 1.5" stock. From that I cut out handrails, toprails, bottom rails and balusters. I even glued up some extra thick stock to make post caps. The only "special" pieces I purchased was the 4x4 posts.

It was a bigger job, but the railings came out great, and I saved a bundle of money.