glued up tapered legs

pete228 | Posted in Wood and Materials on June 10, 2009 03:44am

Hi everyone. Can someone tell me what you do when you want to taper table legs from glued up stock. Say you need a 3 thick inch leg made up from 4/4 stock, so you glue up 3 or 4 pieces of stock to get the thickness. So my problem is when you cut the to inside tapers, like on a Shaker leg, you are going to be cutting through the glue up, it that makes sense. When you do this the leg doesn’t look very good. Any info would be great. thanks

Replies

SteveSchoene | Jun 10, 2009 04:31pm | #1
Very careful matching of grain and color when doing the glue up can minimize some of this bad appearance, as well has having very tight glue joints, but, the far better solution is to make the extra effort and expense to run down 16/4 or 12/4 lumber to start.
saschafer | Jun 10, 2009 04:47pm | #2
You can pre-taper the pieces before lamination. That way, when you trim the legs to the final taper, you won't cut through a glue joint, which always looks bad. But you have to be very careful with your grain matching, or else it will just look weird.

-Steve
philip | Jun 11, 2009 09:36am | #3
Pete,
Can you not organise it so that you are not cutting through a glue line on the taper? It depends on the amount of taper but if you glued up three pieces you would need to have the two outers thick enough to take the taper without feathering out.I am talking about the wide face, not the face made up by the edges, which is not too hard to match up for appearance, but again it depends on the type of wood.
Otherwise you could do what Steve Schafer suggests.Philip Marcou

Edited 6/11/2009 2:39 am by philip
GregoryPaolini | Jun 11, 2009 02:10pm | #4
Pete,

Since it's a simple Shaker taper, You can always glue up a blank, machine your taper, then veneer the leg.

Hope this helps

Gregory Paolini

http://www.GregoryPaolini.com