Weldpro Protects You

Weldpro. with more than 24 years experience in the highly technical area of welding and machining of aluminium, stainless steel and cast iron is well placed to attend to your domestic and commercial security and decorative metal needs.

Weldpro have a specialist division specialising in the manufacture and installation of balustrades, gates, swimming bath steps, fencing and gazebos.

Contact Eddie on 082 710 3435 for your metal craft needs in the Pretoria, South Africa area for guaranteed satisfaction.

Custom Swimming Bath Steps, Balustrades, Security Fencing, Motorised Gates, Burglar Bars, Gazebos, in fact all of your Metal Craft needs are manufactured and installed by Weldpro, Pretoria, South Africa.

Weldpro specialise in the manufacture of balustrades:

A baluster (through the French balustre, from Italian balaustro, from balaustra, "pomegranate flower" [from a resemblance to the post], from Lat. balaustium, from Gr. balaustion) is a moulded shaft, square or circular, in stone or wood and sometimes in metal, supporting the coping of a parapet or the handrail of a staircase, an assemblage of them being known as a "balustrade". The earliest examples are those shown in the bas-reliefs representing the Assyrian palaces, where they were employed as window balustrades and apparently had Ionic capitals. They do not seem to have been known to either the Greeks or the Romans (Wittkower 1974), but late fifteenth-century examples are found in the balconies of palaces at Venice and Verona. These quattrocento balustrades are likely to be following yet-unidentified Gothic precedents, and form balustrades of colonnettes as an alternative to miniature arcading. Rudolf Wittkower withheld judgement as to the inventor of the baluster but credited Giuliano da Sangallo with using it consistently as early as the balustrade on the terrace at the Medici villa at Poggio a Caiano (ca 1480), and employing balustrades even in his reconstructions of antique structures, and, importantly, with having passed the motif to Bramante (his Tempietto, 1502) and Michelangelo, through whom balustrades gained wide currency in the 16th century. Wittkower distinguished two types, one symmetrical in profile that inverted one bulbous vase-shape over another, separating them with a cushionlike torus or a concave ring, and the other a simple vase shape, first employed, according to Wittkower, by Michelangelo.

Use in period identity

The baluster is often a means of dating antique furniture or architectural details. For example, the distinctive twist designs of balusters in oak furniture of the Charles I period in England is characteristic of that specific early 17th century period.

The modern term baluster shaft is applied to the shaft dividing a window in Saxon architecture. In the south transept of the abbey at St Albans, England, are some of these shafts, supposed to have been taken from the old Saxon church. Norman bases and capitals have been added, together with plain cylindrical Norman shafts.