Page Title: Spiral metal steel stair case sandblasted, welded, patched and rebuilt.

Meta Description: Spiral steel staircase welding, repairing, patching & sandblasting & painting. I can completely rebuild a rusted out weak stair case. Check out my many pictures.

Thumb nail Description: This antique steel spiral stair case has so much rust cancer it was dangerous and in need of being replaced. However with the right rare, highly skilled craftsman techniques it could be saved, at 1/3 of the cost with full rebuilding instead of replacement. I bet you've never seen this done before... Take a peak.

 Here is the thumb at 652 pixels wide.

Simaan, the pics on this page are small at 800 pixels wide. They are in this folder in the sub folder "Sml".

There is another folder with identically named pics which are 3000 pixels wide. They are in this sub folder LRG. 

The file names are identical so the only difference is which folder they are being referred to in.

http://sandblastingmobile.com/portfolio/custom-designed-built-welded-tow-hitches/     On this page, you made the 800 wide small pics, link to the much larger pics (which were in a different folder) so when people tap on a picture to bring up our magnifying feature, it was not the 800 wide pic it was showing, but a different much larger pic. I loved that. Thats a feature worth paying for in my mind.

This page is to have the same abilities.
That's why there are two different sized pics in different folders, but of the same visual image.

Inner page starts here below.

These first few pictures show the fabulous deep south lakefront house on St Johns river which needs its steel spiral staircase rebuilt or refurbished.

That beautiful lovely 40 old antique spiral stair case is rusting out, becoming weak and  dangerous.

We are going to sandblast off all the rust so it can be repainted.

We are going to cut out and replace the weak steel by welding in perfectly identical patches.

We will make the welds, patches and new steel, we add to this stair case perfectly invisible so you cannot tell it was rebuilt.

The pictures below show these metal stairs have rusted out so severely they are becoming weak and headed towards dangerous.

Below: Those holes became apparent after the sandblasting removed the paint.

In some areas you can see the rusty corrosion has eaten holes completely through the staircase.

In other areas you can see the rust just beginning as it causes the paint to bubble and lift off. Painting over it wont stop the rust. To remove and stop rust on metal stair cases, sandblasting is the only long term solution.

Below it looked like flaky paint with a little rust underneath. But after that spot was sandblasted, you can see corrosion went all the way through that steel.

A step connects to this corner. There is not much strength left. I would hate to be the person that is stepping on it the day it breaks. Stumbling down steel stairs does not sound fun.

Below we are going to show you the precision with which we can cut out the rusty steel with holes in it, for later welding in new steel patches on this metal spiral staircase.

There was no point in cutting out more metal than was necessary to refurbish these old rusty stairs. That would have just needlessly inflated the bill.

Lets see, I can do half as many jobs for twice as much cost.

Or

I can do twice as many jobs for half as much cost.

Its the same money but which do you think would be best for building my reputation upon?

And since I always have a waiting list of customers, I'm never short of work to do. One avenue makes me feel proud while the other avenue does not.

What I cant figure out, is why does my competition not see it this way. Its not that complex is it?

This customer had other estimates and they wanted to replace entire steps for 50% of her staircase. Their estimate was three times higher than mine. And it would not have been any stronger. Why? Don't they care about saving their customers money?

Here we are fitting up new steel to replace the rusted steel that was cut out. Here it gets a little tricky. We have to be very careful and precise. There is no room for error here or we will have to do it twice. I won't lie, sometimes we have to cut it twice to make a perfect fit. No big deal.

We are very very good, but not perfect all of the time.

Can you see how we build temporary bridges with clamps and tubes just to hold our new tube in the perfect location for welding?

This way it keeps our alignment perfectly straight. When we are finished, you cant tell the stairs were ever repaired because it looks perfect as new.

Hey, you can even see which ones we labeled as braces so its clear which is not going to be the permanent piece. Does this make you wonder if I've ever welded in the wrong one before? <smile>

And we have to be careful we intentionally put a sight slope on the step/tread. I like puddles, but not on a step. On a step I want the rain to run off and not pool.

Below it is time to actually weld in the new steel stair replacement patches that we so carefully measured, cut and fit up.  

See the sand abrasive media on the ground from our sandblasting. The mess gets worse before it gets better.

New pieces are welded in on these repaired stairs, but they are not ground smooth yet, which will make weld 100% invisible. Right now you can see our welds.

You can see for the purposes of getting perfect fits, we tack/spot weld the pieces in first until we are positive all the pieces fit perfect. Then we come back over them a 2nd time and make all the welds full seam welds making it all permanent and forever.

Below: Can you see our welded in piece is not perfectly vertical? That's not on us. That's how the original stairs were built 40 years ago. At this point I CANNOT change it to perfectly vertical or my steel tube wont meet each stair tread. To make it vertical, you have to move the treads to match and we cant do that without tearing the whole stair case apart and redoing everything.

When I pointed out to the homeowner their tubes were not perfectly straight, therefore my replacements could not be perfectly straight either, she was astounded. She lived in that house her entire life and she never notice they were not straight.

Hey below you can see a tube I didnt replace, and its also slanted. Can you find it?

A couple of days earlier, that corner was rusted out and dangerous. Now its as strong as a new stair case. Soon we will grind off the welds and make it look that way to. Then with a fresh paint job, you will never know what is original stair case verses replaced patches.

Above you could see all the welds.

Below you will see the welds disappearing into perfect smoothness that feels like a woman's ...    

...Sorry, I almost forgot I'm in public.

This stuff takes real precision and concentration. A lot of welders cant blend them into perfection.

After we grind them, then we do some polishing. You test it by closing your eyes and feeling it. Let your hands/fingers do the talking. They wont lie to you as your eyes can.

If it feels smooth, the paint job will look perfect. Can you figure out how the paint will look if it does not feel smooth?

Looking real good. Our eyes think its fine.

You ever do a hand feel test while its still hot from grinding? I bet you won't do that again.

This perfection stuff is slow work. Some things you just can't rush.

Below: Ok remember how lumpy bumpy they looked when you could see the welds on the refurbished metal stair tubes?

Now look at them and imagine how smooth they feel. Because they really do feel as smooth as they look. And no, we didn't burn ourselves. We learned that lesson years ago. Some things will just stick in your memory.

Now he's doing a bit of a jump, wiggle, shake it test, to examine how much the rigidity has increased. We are not done, be we are real happy with the rock solid improvements.

The tube is rebuilt and next is the stair tread. But one step at a time. And pun intended.

Can you tell why I'm a welder and not a comedian? All my friends tell me to not quit my day job. Can you believe they would say such a thing to me?

Below: You can see that tread is still awaiting its patch so it can reach out and and connect to the vertical support tube.

Patience I keep telling them. Well, they haven't run away yet, so I guess their listening to me. Nobody else does.

Its deceptive. This stair case just looked like it had a few bad spots. But oh my goodness, it really was so much work. But no matter how we look at it, it was miles cheaper than buying a whole new spiral steel stair case.

Below: Ok, does the stair case lean out to the left, or does the column lean out to the right?

Below: Ok, now I'm going to show you a different perspective or different point of view. Now I'm only going to focus on one rusted rotten spot of the metal stair and show you all the steps done in sequence of just that one place. This gets interesting seeing it this way.  

Its that 2nd from the bottom stair tread. 1st we cut out the rusted rotten steel.

Then we clean, grind the picket post tube to make it free of previous weld.

Now we put in a large patch piece, and draw/trace the shape on it that we will need to later cut.

He cuts the patch for a perfect fit, then welds the new stair peice in.

Again lumpy bumpy welds on the new stair patch. But not for long.

Now he begins grinding off the excess weld towards making it smooth as a babies....

This is harder than it looks. We make it look easy.

Grind a little, stop and examine progress. Grind a little, stop and examine progress. Grind a little, stop and examine progress. Grind a little, stop and examine progress.

We have to be real careful to not grind too much. And that's easy to do when the grinding wheel is hiding what your working on.

How many times do you think a welder showered his legs with hot sparks before he learned to do things differently?

That welded patch is truly as strong as the original metal was before it went to rusting.

Below: Here we are over one week later. These are the rusted, rotten stair pieces that were removed so new pieces could be welded in.

Can you believe to replace those corroded peices of stair case, took us longer than a week? I just cant see it by looking at this scrap pile. But I know it to be true because I was there each and every one of those days.

Guess what? We still are not done. Those were the stair pieces that needed replacement. Now we have to deal with the rust that has not rotted all the way through, but if left unchecked, it will.

Time for setting up to do sandblasting. In the areas were we have to aim towards the house, I set up durable barriers to stop the sand from flying to where it should not go. Like windows.

Its not a very exciting job. But somebody's got to do it. Better him than me I tell you.

Now that we cut out and replaced the worst of the rusted steel, the rest isn't too bad. Now there is about a zillion little pieces the size of dimes and quarters where the rust is bubbling up under the paint.

If the rust is completely blasted off until it is 100% gone, then it will not be able to grow further.

If it is not sandblasted down to virgin bare metal, the rust will continue to grow and the problem will be back in a year or two. That's not permissible.

Here we are going over the stair case with a fine tooth comb searching for even the slightest hint of rust. We examine every single square inch. We are Dr's on a mission to remove cancer.

The homeowner debated sandblasting just the rusted areas verses sandblasting the entire stair case. As it was, when they hired us, they were having a wedding in 14 days later (at this house) and it was not allowable to have any unfinished work. Due to the tight time crunch, we could not do all the welding and sandblast the entire stair case and have time left for the painters, to come and paint the whole house.

The day we finished sandblasting this rusted steel spiral stair case, the painters were due to show up and repaint everything. There was no time left over. Zero, zilch, none. To maintain our deadline, we even had to work on a Saturday and Sunday. My customer was so happy to see me working such long hours and days to maintain our schedule, I almost got kissed. I did get tipped nicely. 

Sandblasting makes a bit of a mess. We are literally throwing sand around everywhere.

One thing that's great about sandblasting is that we can get tight into corners our other power tools would never get to. We can get into tight little holes, nooks, corners, crannies and other impossible areas.

But sandblasting is expensive. I cannot call it the cheap rust removal process. But I can call the best rust removal procedure currently known to man.

When we were coming down to the last two days, I showed the customer our progress and what was left. They decided which corners to cut to save time, and which not to cut.

Making the bottoms of the lowest steps pretty and smooth, was a corner we could cut since it was very unlikely you would lie on your back on the ground just to look up at the bottom steps.

But we did strip the rust off perfectly so it could get a perfect paint job so the rust would stay gone for another two decades.

Below, see those tiny hoes the sandblasting exposed that had been hidden behind layers of paint? We were able to take the welder and weld those holes closed. We could just fill it in with weld/liquid metal because they were so small.

We did that in many places. Water must be kept out of the tubes or they will rust out from the inside out.

Sand is flying in the air.

We were not the contractor to paint the refurbished/rebuilt/repair stair case. I did not want to have to paint the rest of her house to get the job. I was so happy to not have to paint. Sometimes I'm not that lucky.