Breakfast table Legs

The client really loved the symmetrical legs, so I knew these were going to be an interesting challenge to make consistent. So, a lot of the strategies I employed in the making of the legs were related to consistency.

The leg design presented two challenges, what to do regarding grain orientation. (making it out of a single piece vs with a glue joint) and how to cut the internal geometry in a way that all 4 legs were near identical. In order to tackle both i opted to cut both pieces out of a single beam.

Planing it so that the grain was running parallel with the edge of the board. This allowed me to split the two parts while keeping a clean glue edge and also ensuring that the grain ran nice and true along the longest line of the leg. This, in turn, gave me a nice consistent edge from which I could make my consecutive cuts.

By leaving the mass of the offcut near parallel with the glueline the glueup was pretty straight forward.

here you can see the second angle being cut using the common clean reference surface as a guide for the saw. Once the top two angles were established i could use the same edge to rip the large taper on the table saw.

Once all cuts were made on the table saw the last cut was roughed out on the band saw, then all four were clamped together to allow for a consistent finish by hand.