A side note: Those stair kits will never pass code unless you have a perfectly level, flat ground under the deck. Precut stair stringers are a joke! A person can't even lay out stairs correctly until they mark a minimum of 3 elevations: 2 at the first riser and another for the deck surface. Only then can you lay out the stringers so all the steps meet code. To: Mr Aidan M. I don't sell stair kits. The deck packages are a pile of lumber that still needs to be cut. Primary focus of thedeckbarn is aluminum balusters. Which if you quit railing off on the mouth you could save a lot of money buying by knowing me. I am in this to save you money on quality products period. I flat out am sick and tired of the retail prices larger manufacturers want to impose on deck builders, most of whom are hard working guys trying to make a buck. While various greedy muck racking profiteers sit in their boadrooms and are only concerned with market share. John Hyatt: You could have a very valid point in your statement about the different areas of the country affecting products differently. To which one might surmise that this whole deal is a regional issue and there is no perfect decking for any one area. With the SA and Chinese you still have the arguements about imports, buying american etc. What I do know for as fact is that Trex works up here and so does NewTech Composite. I have built enough decks up here to know. NewTech is coming out with capstock decking and it will be available Mid March. NewTech has 4 regional warehouses, California, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Texas. It is sold in Europe, Australia, China and THE United States. They have 43 dedicated lines making decking 24/7 365. Their lines ares dedicated to a single color to avoided the variances in batches caused by having to purge the extrusion lines for color changes. Steve Scholl MR SPAM

I doubt that you can string SS cable on composite posts. Too much tension. Using identical wood framework, the SS cable materials are easily 3x as much as aluminum balusters. Labor is about equal.

Would like to see pictures if you can post to site. Nobody at "pro desk" at local HD and Lowes seems to know anything about their products! Thinking of doing inside mount. Concerned about solid attachment given height of deck. I am doing diagonal boards for strength. If I do an inside mount, can I still get away without a separate border around deck. It would be much simpler to have diagonal boards go all the way to the deck edge rather than build supports for a border around deck. Surface mount brackets would be simpler (require bracing underneath), but not as sure on strength. Are 4 3" screws for each post surface mounted thru 1" IPE into PT cross pieces sturdy enough? While I have seen pictures of surface mounted rails on steps, have some concern about trip hazard on long steep staircase (and also needing bracing under floating step to mount post) so I am thinking outside mount on stairs, but still concerned about railings being strong enough and rigid if just attached to stringers.

Went to City Hall today and with the Engineer's letter they passed the balusters. Tom8344, thanks for the sober second thought. I know to meet code in Ontario (and for my deck height) my rail has to be 42" and the space between the deck and bottom rail can't be more than 4" (though looking at the engineer's report...it looks like there is no space). I'm hoping that the extra 7" inches will provide some measure of safety (though I suppose nothing will stop a curious child from climbing up on a chair to peer over!). You've also provided some good info about the spacing of the pickets and possible twisting. I'll talk to my contractor about that. If anyone has any info about this (good and bad), it would be greatly appreciated. I'm looking at the architectural balusters and hope by the way they are installed that the twisting issue will not be an issue. Cheers, S