Custom Nosing without Backing Rods: Why backing rods aren’t always better

When looking to purchase stair nosing, you may notice that some manufacturers have something called a backing rod behind every stair nosing. The purpose of the backing rod is to provide more surface for the stair nosing to be attached to in order to create the protruding edge of the nosing. This backing rod also serves as extra support for the weight as many believe that glue will not hold the nosing together without the rod for support. However, we don’t believe that is true in all cases..

We often get asked why we don’t have backing rods for our laminate and engineered nosing, this is because we don’t actually need it. After numerous experiments we found that the backing rod made absolutely no difference to the structural stability of our laminate and hardwood nosing. We put nosings with and without backing rods to the test and applied immense pressure to the surface to see if they would perform the same. We found that the nosing without a backing rod did not lose its shape or shift when applied with massive amounts of weight and pressure. This is because we use a special tight bond glue which can withstand a lot of pressure. In fact, during our experiments with weight we found that most flooring materials would crack long before the glued part of the nosing would, which means that the nosing itself is perfectly stable with or without a rod. We have been using this method since the start of our business and have received no customers complaints about reduced stability or durability due to the lack of a backing rod and we know that our laminate and hardwood nosing do not need them.

That being said, we aren’t saying that backing rods are entirely useless. Infact, we use backing rods for our vinyl nosing. That's because vinyl planks do not hold their form well without being glued to something like a backing rod. Backing rods for vinyl nosing increase durability while providing structure for a material that struggles to hold structure alone. We provide MDF or plywood backing rods for all of our custom vinyl stair nosing.

We hope that this article provides a bit more clarity about why we don’t use backing rods in all of our stair nosing. With this information,we hope you feel confident in ordering our nosing whether they come with or without a backing rod as we always have our customers' best interests in mind.