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 :-)