Well when the wife and I were at the beach last month our 12 yo dog apparently wasn't happy about being left with the mother in law. He decided to chew a little on a stairwell baluster. I looked on the web and found that Lowes carried a replacement in stock so I went and picked up two. The description stated it was a traditional replacement. Well - it wasn't a 100% match for sure. After cutting the damaged spindle in half and removing it I took it and a new spindle over to the shop and mounted the new spindle to my lathe and used a few different scrapers to reshape the bulb portion pretty close to the original. Below is the obvious damaged spindle, the unmodified new one and finally my modified spindle which now just needs paint.
