TOUCHING UP THE HANDRAILS PLAN A & PLAN B

Having spent some time removing, re-bedding and refinishing BIANKA's handrails back in 2011. It was time to do a little touch up. Like most painting and varnishing projects prepping the area takes longer than the actual brush work. So in keeping with my desire to use what you have and recycling things wherever possible I cam up with what I thought would be a cunning plan to prep the area around the handrails. I'd use a patterned piece to used shrink wrap to fit under the handrails to catch any drips. I could also reuse the patterned shrink wrap in the future too. So I cut a long strip of recycled shrink wrap and laid it over the handrail:

Then I used a marker and drew a  line down the approximate center to the hand rail:

Then using a box cutter I cut along the line I drew on the heat shrink. To make sure I did not cut into the handrail this was done after removing the heat shrink from the handrails:

Now I could poke the hand rail through the opening I just cut. I would then just use the cutter and trim around the handrail stanchions so that I would be able to have a pattern that would enable for me to place both side of the heat shrink under the handrail:

 It worked ok but, it was difficult to exactly cut the pattern right and took a longer time than I expected. Plus dealing with a 90 inch strip of shrink wrap was a little unwieldy.  So for the other hand rail I came up with a better plan. I cut small pieces of the heat shrink into sizes that would fit under the space between the stanchions instead of one long 90 inch strip:

This was much faster and easier to install. All I had to do was tape around the stanchions to secure the heat shrink and protect those areas from drips. This was much better and easier than my original plan. I was still recycling some of the shrink wrap and could reuse the patches I cut next time too. So even though my first idea did not work as good as I thought it would be. I did find a better way that saves on tape use, still protects the deck and recycles some the heat shrink plastic at the same time.