Hall Table Project: Making the Curved Legs

I'm building a table right now that incorporates these curved legs. They're tapered in such a way where they start out sort of medium thickness, about an inch-and-a-half, taper gently to about the 1/3 of the way down point, where they hit about an inch-and-an-eighth and then gradually flare out toward the bottom where they get down to about two inches at their widest point at the bottom. They're tapered like that or curved on two sides, and the other two sides are straight. These are much easier to make than I thought at first and perhaps that you might think, than you might think. So I'm gonna walk through the process and show you how to make these. So first thing we do is start out with a square blank, and this is 2 inches by 2 inches by 34 inches tall. And we're going to first mill our mortises in the stock. It's much easier to mill mortises in a squared up piece of stock than it is in a, after you've cut the curves in it. So, I've got all the mortises complete, and we're ready to do the curved cuts on it. So what we do is use a template to draw the lines. So this is a template that I created by cutting a 1/4-inch piece of plywood by tracing out the curve that I wanted to cut, cutting it carefully on the bandsaw, leaving the line, and then took it over to a belt sander and carefully removed stock, getting it right down to the line, so I've a nice, smooth transition all the way through. And as long as you're really careful in doing that, you're gonna end up with a good template that will set you up for success when you do the curved cuts. Then we just take the template, being careful to get the right side up, laying it on the stock. And in this case I used a white chalk pencil or white charcoal pencil on walnut, but essentially, so I can see it better, but essentially, you're just gonna trace your line, end up with a nice smooth slope. And then we're gonna take that over to the bandsaw. I'm gonna make the first curved cut there. Then I'm gonna come right back here, and we're gonna prepare this blank for the second curved cut. Okay, I'm set up here at the bandsaw and I've got a 3/8-inch, 4-tooth-per-inch blade set up, and that should be just fine, and I'm about to make the first curved cut on this piece. My goal is to stay right up to the line or just barely outside of the line. I don't want to drift inside of the line because that's gonna set my next step up at the sanding station up for a lot more work, and I've done that on this style leg, and I just strongly encourage you to steer clear of going inside of the line. So wish me luck. You can be the judge of how I do and here we go. All right, the first curved cut at the bandsaw went really well. Now what we're gonna do is put these two pieces back together temporarily for the second cut, which will give us a nice square surface to work with on the bandsaw. So I'm just gonna put a couple of laps of tape on here and I'm gonna go ahead and extend the line. So I already had the line drawn on the, for the second cut, but now I'm gonna just go ahead and sweeten that up a little bit with a pencil so I can see it, so I don't have to guess and get myself into trouble. Okay, so then I'm gonna take this over to the bandsaw, make that second cut, and then, after that, I'll meet you over at the sanding station where we'll clean up after the bandsaw. All right, all set up at the bandsaw for cut number two, set up just as before. So I'll go ahead and let's cut. All right, that one went well, and we can pull the blank out of the wraps and see we've got actually a very good quality cut on both of those. So now, we'll take it over to the sanding station and clean it up, and we'll be well on our way. All right, everything went great at the bandsaw. Next step is to remove any stock. We're gonna take it right up to the line on the leg on both of the surfaces that we cut at the bandsaw. So my process here is essentially to use this oscillating belt sander. Now, if you don't have one of these, you could use a handheld belt sander, as well. That works fine. I've done this style leg that way. The main thing is, if you use that, you're gonna just have to concentrate and make sure that you measure as you go, so you don't get out of square and get one side of the leg a little bit thinner than the other. Another way you could do that is with a kind of good old-fashioned spokeshave, and I've done it that way as well, and that's kind of a nice way to do it as well. You can get really good results. Again, take your time, make sure that you get, keep things square as you go forward. So I'm gonna, for now, with this belt sander, use this. This does a nice job because it holds the leg square to the belt sander, and it's also a good powerful machine, smooth operating, and it really makes efficient work of this. Now I actually have a 150 grit belt on here, which is, at this stage is typically you'd consider that to be a little bit too fine for this type of operation. But I like it in that it slows things down a little bit, gives me really good control, and I don't gouge and go too deeply with the shaping operation. It takes a little bit longer to do it this way, but I really find that I get better results in it. The next step, where I'll take it over to the random orbital sander, it doesn't leave much work for me to do at that next station. Okay, I'm gonna go ahead and fire this up, and you can watch. All right, that got the results that I wanted, got me down to the line on each side. Now I'm gonna take this over to the random orbital sander station, clean it up a little bit, and then we'll head over to the assembly table, where I'll show you a couple of additional details that I like to do with this style leg. All right, I got the leg all sanded out. I hit it with the random orbital sander after the belt sander. So I really like how it came out. It got the shape that I'm looking for. Now, just a couple things to finish off this leg. The first will be to do a chamfer on the back square corner. So you got three edges that have a curve to them and one that is perfectly square. So what I like to do is just make a mark maybe six to eight inches up the back of that edge. And just with a block plane, I'm gonna start by just making a couple of cuts down at the bottom, gradually making it a little bit longer and a little bit longer, and I'm holding it at a 45-degree angle, little bit longer as we go, and we're just creating a nice gentle chamfer on the back of that leg. And it just kind of gives it a little bit better flow to it in the overall design. And then, one last thing that I like to do on these is to just take a spokeshave and just gently break the corners all the way around. And this just also just kind of adds to the overall flow. So I'm just with a light cut set on the spokeshave just making a nice gradual cut, and you can see the little ribbon that that cut off, and I'll just do that two or three strokes on each corner all the way around till I get a nice, nice gentle curve rather than the kind of harsh sharp corners. And then, once that's all done, I'm gonna hit it again with some hand sanding, take it up to 220 grit, and then this'll be good. So here's your bellbottom leg, adds a nice curvy element to a table project. Hope you give it a try in an upcoming project.