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How to Make Octagonal Tapered Legs

Tapered Octagons Are Just Planing to a Line

The Welsh Stick chair is the first thing that comes to mind when I think of tapered octagonal legs. If you don’t have a lathe and look longingly at the round legs on furniture thinking you could never accomplish those then perhaps you should consider making an octagonal leg. But that can look a little clunky. So why not taper it and get this cool pencil post look.

“But that looks really complex and hard to do!”

Stop whining Luke Skywalker and pick up a plane because this process is nothing more than planing to a line. Its easy and the hardest part is actually laying out the octagons and transferring the lines down your blank. In other words, its not the least bit difficult.

There are certainly other ways and other tools that can be used to do this same task. I find a drawknife to be super fast when hogging off the wood, and a spokeshave is a lot of fun to use to refine the facets. But using a hand plane offers a lot more control if you have never attempted a leg like this before.

New Lessons From The Hand Tool School Vault

    In this tutorial I mentioned a more detailed look at creating the initial square taper as well as a video on the Joiner’s Saddles that I used while shaping the octagon. There is also a good tip on using the saw plate reflection to your advantage while sawing. Make sure to check out:

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Noel Hayward

Hi Shannon,

Thank you for a most interesting article on making octagonal legs. I use the same principles for marking out, however my planing method differs significantly to yours.

The main reason being I think is that I do not have a nice big bench like you, but a cheap and nasty B&D lookalike Workmate bench. To that I sit a wooden trough a little longer and wider than the legs with a stop glued in at one end. I then have a series of small wooden saddles that fit into the trough to both raise the work and support it as well. I always plane horizontally not down the hill as you do. Also after finishing the first side, I plane the opposite side next. (Why,? I have no idea, your method of going around the leg sounds OK as well.) I use a wooden scrub plane to take most of the wood off, then finish with a smoothing plane

Using the trough arrangement has worked well for me, I have made in excess of 25 legs so far.

Best regards

Noel

Jonas

A simpler way to layout the lines for the octagon is to use a spar gauge – a piece of wood with a square cut-out, where the gap is divided by two nails (or pencils) into the sections 1:1.41:1. See eg http://www.pettigrews.org.uk/lm/page030a.htm or google spar gauge and you will find a lot of more or less elaborated designs. The relation 1:1.41:1 is the one of a diagonal in a square. Traditional boat makers used the proportions 7:10:7, which is easier to measure but still accurate enough.

Should you want to make the octagonal leg into a 16-sided one, you make a second gauge with the nails set in proportions 1 : 1.85 : 1
[equals to 1:(sin 135)/(sin 22.5):1, if you’re interested in the math).