Magnets

As a I designed this I saw that I would have a piece that was only a half inch wide and would sit flush up against the staircase in one of the configurations. A nice shake of the table or bump on the piece could knock it over and chip or break it. So I thought about magnets. The first thing I got was the roll tape magnet. That didn't work at all, not enough magnetism in them to make it stick. Eventually I found these near rare earth magnets on Amazon the were 1/4" inch cubes. The picture below is for reference.

As you can see below, these cubes fit neatly in standards bricks and 1/2" bricks though I didn't need any of those.

   In the casting process, after you let the mold sit for the time to let it set and then scrape, you can easily push the magnet into the brick mold.

   

NOTE: after pushing it into the mold, you'll need to scrape it again. Make sure you use a plastic scrapper, otherwise your metal one will suck the magnet righ out of the plaster.

   Since these are near rare earth magnets, their ability to repel each other is just as strong as their attraction. So when making these bricks you need to plan ahead with what bricks go where and make sure the repelling doesn't occur. For this project I had to make 8 of these bricks for the left staircase.

 Here's a picture to show where I embedded the magnets for the left side of the staircase.

   The magnets worked perfectly. They are so strong that when the wall piece doesn't move even when picking up the entire stair.