Re-planing the Legs Smaller
2012.10.07
After deciding the legs were too thick, I went back through my books and magazines, and found a Shaker side table similar to my design. But the legs were only 1–1/8″ square, instead of 1–1/2″. That looked more graceful. So I made some adjustments in my design, and began to plane the legs down to 1–1/8″.
Yeah, this will definitely be better. Wish I’d figured this out in the design phase, before I started sawing. I could have saved myself some work.
Furthermore, I could have rotated my sawcuts more in some places to better align the grain. Table legs look best when the grain runs diagonally from one corner to the opposite corner, roughly 45° to the faces. This is riftsawn, also called bastard grain. Otherwise, two faces will have flatsawn grain with cathedrals, and the other two will have quartersawn grain with stripes. Much better to have stripes all around, so that visually the legs wrap around without a jarring transition. The straight grain also accentuates the thin vertical shape of the legs.
On the legs that were too close to flatsawn/quartersawn, I set my bevel square to about 10° to mark out the smaller leg, and planed 10° off the old faces. It’s not much, but anything helps. I actually went through this process already when planing the legs at the original size. So in the end, I had tilted them 15° to 20° from the original faces of the board.
After a lot of planing, all eight legs were down to the new dimension of 1–1/8″.
Sawing Legs