Before and after:
$2500 is either expensive or half what it's worth depending on which side of the fence you're on.
It took over 3 hours just to get the curved section of railing to drop back into place. That's after spending an hour and a half with my lazer level making location points on the walls.
Crazy job. Not sure how to bill it out. I had no idea the railing was going to be such a temperamental beast. The guy who built and installed this custom railing is long gone..... so he can no longer be strangled or bludgeoned.
His mistake is when making this all every connection point was done at the machinist level.
All wood to wood, and all wood to metal joinery was fit perfectly.
Sounds good in theory that a one off staircase was made with such precision.
My nightmare removing the railing and it's bits and pieces were not expected at all.
Everything was tight. So tight that one afternoon, I went home to get my large Makita compressor and my CP air chisel to vibrate the sections apart. My #2 dead blow wouldn't budge it. Today we had 10 balusters to drop into those steel buckets on the stairs. When things started going kantywampas even though they were alined properly, we had to put on our Columbo hats.
We will go here and there and everything looks fine but the baulisters wouldn't drop in fully.
Which ones were fighting us, which ones were too tight, which ones were okay?
We had to align this middle curved section of railing with the upper straight section on the first four stairs. The screw holes needed to fit correctly, aligned just like they were when I first took them apart a few weeks ago.
This is why I did the stairs in sections. I did the first four, then put the railing back and made sure it aligned with the curved section which we hadn't removed yet.
Then I removed the curved section and then put it back.
Had I taken all three of the railing sections off in one felled swoop, I'd have had no reference points as to what happened prior. I'd be totally guessing as of what what where and what what wrong.
What have I learned from this?
The bracket that I made for my laser level showed me and told me so much. The three plane laser should be screw locations, angle locations in many of the things.
Looking back, many of those things might not have been necessary.
The question is have they been necessary and I have not done them where would I be now? I have no reference points, the railing wouldn't fit, and I wouldn't have a clue why or how to correct it.
I think I did the correct thing building the bracket for my laser so that I could accurately mark the walls, giving me absolute reference points for if nothing else, to reassure myself.
The largest issue was the wood shrinkage. The stair railing and parts werebobviously made in someone's unheated shop. Once installed, every part of this oak railing shrunk up and tightened either to itself or to the metal parts that fastened the railing to the stairs.
Had he cut all these connection points or dimensions 1/8# shy to make installation easier, it would have went to the together just fine even after shrinking up over the years. I'm convinced that the man who made these stairs was a machinist....
I'm thinking that every piece of wood he machined, was fit to a 0005" tolerance,
and that everything had to be flawlessly exact...... before it shrank. HEY, it's WOOD !!!
Prolly coulda made some hoofer outta the sawdust and some glue but that’s not what the stars had in store for this countertop. 
