tapered octagon legs

[Aaron Kline]

Well, I was asked to make a chair copied from a local one, but the style is prevelant Pennsylvania German. If you have the book "Making Authentic Pennsylvania German Furniture", it's the chair on page 158 I'm reffering to. The thing I'm hung up on is the legs. The top of the leg is 1.25" square, the bottom is 5/8" square. A four sided taper. Then there's a chamfer on each corner. at the bottom it is a 1/8" chamfer and at the top it is a 1/4" chamfer. I have a planer and tablesaw and bodygrip router. How do I make these things? Thanks. Oh, they're going to be hard maple or white oak.

[Jim Becker]

Make a jig to hold the workpiece in the proper orientation as you move it through the saw to cut the tapers/chamfers...something that rotates comes to mind.

[Lee DeRaud]

Tablesaw and tapering jig would be my vote. Cut the four main tapers first...note that you'll need to adjust the jig after the first two faces. Then tiilt the blade to 45 and do the corner tapers the same way.

There will be a total of four separate setups for the tapering jig...like any tool setup problem, the main trick is to keep track of which cuts have been done on which leg and do all the cuts for each setup before changing it.

[Jamie Buxton]

If you have a regular taper jig of any sort, do the first four tapers with the table saw. Then mark out the other four faces on the ends of the leg and make them with a hand plane.

[John Timberlake]

Unless you are making a lot of these, I would definitely use a hand plane to put the chamfers on. Much faster than trying to set up a jig on a table saw.

[Brian Lindenlaub]

The latest issue of Popular Woodworking (April 2006) has an article on building a Pleasant Hill Shaker Saturday Table, that includes instructions for making tapered octagonal legs using a bandsaw with a shop-made jig.