Building the Stair Handrail and Platform Details for a Safe and Complete Playground Structure

In this video, we're going to finish creating the handrails for our playground. So first things first, you might recall that we set these beams to be as high as 30 inches above this platform, which we found was appropriate for a child to use. But these handrails are going to have to get trimmed down just a bit to make room for the platform that's actually going to sit on top, because the platform is actually what needs to be 30 inches above.

So let's go ahead and make that trim now. I'm going to start a sketch just on any one of these surfaces. Let's do this one.

And just like before, I'm going to hide this big beam. All right, let's go to convert entities and grab the tops of each of these beams that live on the second floor. Don't forget this green one here.

Go to features, extrude cut, make sure that it's cutting in the right direction. And let's set it to blind. And then go ahead and place our board thickness as the cutting depth.

All right, set that. All right, looks good. The next thing I want to do is I want to start to visualize how the handrail is going to look as it travels down the stairs.

And we can do that by creating a reference sketch. So let's select a surface here and start making those lines. I think we'll just start a line here and just kind of bring it out.

And let's create another line here and then bring that out as well. We know that our handrail platforms are going to be the standard board thickness,  so might as well just set that now. And I want the angle of the stair handrail to start at the very tip of this last beam towards the front.

Now, this angle is still kind of arbitrary,  but it needs to more or less match what's happening with the stairs. Well, good news is we have a line or a series of lines that we can make parallel to that line. All right, this will be the angle of how that stair handrail travels down.

And it's finally going to stop right at where a bottom beam is going to be. So let's go ahead and ghost out where that bottom beam is going to live. Grab this second stair corner, go down to the bottom,  over, up.

Let's go ahead and smart dimension this to our board thickness. Beautiful. Highlight this line and highlight this line by holding shift and click merge.

All right,  so it's more or less kind of how that handrail is going to look. We're going to have a beam that lives right here. Go ahead and connect that out.

Then let's extend this up with a… I'm going to undo that. Grab a solid line,  go vertically, extend this, and then connect with this top line here. Make this line and this line parallel to each other.

And then let's make sure that this is set to our board thickness. All right, now that we've done that, we can go ahead and trim away this line that we don't need anymore. By the way, I set my trim command to the hotkey T, which I find really easy to use,  so I recommend it for you as well.

Close that out. All right, that will be more or less how our handrail will extend down the stairs. So let's go ahead and do that now.

We'll close out this sketch. Why don't we name this? Slow double click. We'll call it handrail reference sketch.

Beautiful. All right, let's start by building the top platform first. Select this surface to start a new sketch.

Create an arbitrary corner rectangle out here in space. There we go. I want the width of this platform to match our wide board width.

I want the platform to stop along the back of this beam right here. So let's go ahead and set that now. I'm going to grab that edge and that corner, and let's set a pierce relationship.

A pierce relationship is essentially a coincident relationship, but they actually happen to cross paths in reality. They don't just align in one direction like a coincident relationship does. So it's a little bit more robust than a standard coincident relationship.

Okay, next let's decide where this is going to end. We'll do that by how it butts up against a handrail platform that will lift here. So let's ghost that out as well too.

Let's go ahead and just kind of grab a corner there, bring it off. We know that this line and this line will be equal to each other. We know that these two lines will be collinear.

Let's make this bottom rectangle a construction rectangle. We don't want to actually extrude it. This will be where that other platform sits,  so we know that this is going to click and drag and butt right up against it in that location.

Great, we have created the sketch for our back rail. Let's go ahead and extrude it out. We'll use Boss Extrude, Blind, and we'll set it to the global variable of board thickness,  uncheck Merge Result, and click the green check mark to close it out.

While we're here, let's go ahead and make some new volumes green. Now we have this one that we just created. We also have the stair support platform from the last video, so let's highlight that as well.

Let's create the handrail that's going to go in this direction. Let's see how we want to do this here. I want to utilize this reference sketch,  so I'm not going to build a sketch facing downward.

I actually want to build a sketch facing this direction so I can see my reference sketch. If you could follow along,  turn your model like so. Once you grab this surface here, this very last beam, the inside surface, and start your sketch.

Now what I want to do is I want to start copying some lines. Go to Convert Entities, copy this line, copy this line. Great.

Now even though we've copied those lines, we can still drag a vertex out even further. Let's drag those vertices so that they are coincident with this back line. All right, we'll connect them with another line.

All right, so far so good. Let's hide this beam as well, get this out of the way. All right, now let's assess what we're going to do next.

We know that the handrail will stop here and there'll be a notch cut occurring right at this area. So it looks like it's already got that for us thanks to our reference sketch. Let's just connect that.

And now that we have our sketch completed,  let's go to Features, Extrude Boss Base, make sure it's facing the right direction. And for this, let's set to our wide board width, uncheck Merge Result, and then close the feature with the green check mark. Save your work.

Let's color this new volume green. All right, so far so good. All we have left to do is create this last handrail piece.

But as you can see, it actually cuts through this beam. So before we do anything, let's trim that beam first. Highlight a sketch along the side of that beam.

Let's create a coincident relationship that captures the portion, or rather all the portions, of the beam that we want to remove. Make sure it's nice and fully defined in black. Once we've done that, go to Features,  and we'll just cut this up to vertex.

There we go. There we go. Beautiful.

Let's make the outside of this top platform piece. And let's go ahead and just trace out the rest of this handrail based on our reference sketch. Here we go.

All right, that looks pretty good. Let's extrude it to this edge. Uncheck Merge Result, because it's its own unique piece.

And we'll go ahead and color this beam as well. Great. Now, let's go and save our work.

We know that this beam right here is going to be repeated all the way down as it goes down through the stairs. But one thing we discovered when we created this stair platform is that we maintain a consistent 5 3 8 inch distance between the stairs until we get to the very bottom and we have a smaller platform piece. That indicates to me that this bottom beam is likely going to be a different height than this beam here.

Let's just make sure. I'm going to go ahead and take a measurement of this dot to this dot. 36.0139. Great.

Now let's do,  I'm going to open up a sketch, start a line, take a measurement from that dot to the bottom of that beam. 32.033. Okay. They are indeed different lengths.

They're going to be unique beams. We need to create this bottom beam. All right.

So first things first, why don't we start a sketch on the inside of that beam here? All right. I clicked N to flip my entire model 180 degrees just now. I'm going to trace out this silhouette here.

There we go. We are creating a brand new beam. Feature, extrude boss base.

And we know it's going to be the same width as this guy. So let's go ahead and just extrude to a vertex at the end of this beam. Let's pick,  yeah, let's pick the edge of this chamfer.

That should be fine. Uncheck merge results. Close it out with the green check mark.

And now that we have a new brand new beam,  we're going to highlight it and color it green. There's one last thing that I want to do to this handrail. I actually want to extend it a little bit further out.

I don't like that these are necessarily flush. So I'm going to go into the sketch that created this handrail,  open the sketch. I'm going to turn this line into a construction line.

And then just extend it just a little bit, even make those perpendicular. I like the look of that. I'll make these two lines collinear.

Please follow along with this, by the way. I'll set a distance here. It'll extend three inches beyond.

Once I've done that, I'll close that out. Watch the sketch update. And why don't we go ahead and just put a one inch by 45 degree chamfer on that corner as well.

And this corner. So these kids don't hurt themselves when they're running around. There we go.

All right. This is starting to look like a handrail. Everything looks great.

Save your work. This was a longer lesson. We covered a lot.

So let's double check our solid bodies 115. We can double check our volume, which again, you want to be within a few cubic inches of. We have 73704.2. Most importantly, we've got the number of solid bodies.

Your model is functioning and looking the way that this model is here. And we have the same bodies colored green. So take a minute, have a look and make sure that your model matches what's appearing here.

I'm going to reshow the hidden bodies so we can view those as well. All right. If everything is looking good, go ahead and save your work.

And we'll see you in the next video. In the next video, we're going to create the roof pieces and we're going to group all of our current work into folders and name some of our most important feature tree items.