Taper Jig for Table legs

[bainin]

I decided for my next table, I wanted to add a minor taper to the legs to "match" some existing furniture we have.

Going thru the tutorials, I hadn't yet come to making tapered cuts - so i learned something along the way...perhaps a better understanding of the relationship of fence and blade.

My 3D geometric minds-eye is somewhat underpowered, so I first simply mounted a board directly to my fence with different thickness spacers front to back (washers) to create an angle relative to the fence and thus the blade.

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Well after MANY test cuts and offset angles, I kept finding that I ended with a board with no apparent angle and perfectly parallel sides ! Perplexing !

By the next day-sleep hadn't come up with any reason why my boards with an introduced angled relative to the fence apparently came out straighter than my straight cuts with just the fence..so I had to resort to the tapered cut lessons.

Hmm-curiously- the lesson described a sliding jig to produce a tapered cut. I had built a stationary jig...and finally I got it.

A straight cut is one in which the perpendicular distance from the fence to the blade point of contact is constant thru-out the whole cut. The static jig, even though it has an angle to it, wasnt changing the distance between fence and blade at that point of contact.

The sliding jig is effectively changing that distance-inducing the narrowing effect of a taper.

My first jig-even though it has an angle relative to the fence/blade...the distance at the point of contact to the jig was not changing.

Thunderstruck-I moved on to come up with a sliding jig that utilized the pieces of my stationary mistake. I added a hinge at the front and an offset circle knob at the back to allow me to change the angle easily. The circle knob also provides an edge to support the board end as it slides past the blade.

I utilized some sliding T-nuts mounted to the top of the fence to allow for the sliding action with some control.

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This produces the tapered effect I was looking for and now I can move on to attempting some legs !


Sorry for rambling-but its been a 2 or 3 day saga for me-now you have to suffer as well


b

[chapmanruss]

Suffer, No but I did chuckle a little thinking back on things I thought should work only to realize I was doing something backwards too.

[edflorence]

Great tale; thanks for sharing. The jig you came up with is similar to the one in PTWFE, but the offset wheel for changing the taper is something I have not seen before. I like the fact that it also acts as a support for the work piece. What sort of range of tapers can you get with it?

[algale]

LoL. Of course I make tapers sometimes on my jointer -- by accident.

[bainin]

Ed-

I've seen it discussed 2 ways- I'll give you both :


Min 7/64 per board foot ~ 0.2deg
Max 59/64 per board foot ~ 3.9deg

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b

[reible]

This might be of interest to you:

https://www.shopsmith.com/ss_forum/view ... ig#p126972

The post is from back in 2012 so some links may no longer work, I did not check that but it pretty much stands on its own anyway.

Ed

[bainin]

Ed- that looks really great. Much more flexible than my approach (which will be good just long enough for my table leg project I suspect ! )


I had considered a sled style jig but -

1. Didn't have a proper thickness / size piece of plywood for sled style on hand

2. I'm always struggling on infeed/outfeed support on the SS table...I really need to find some solutions for longer boards


b

[Hobbyman2]

looks like you are doing good so far can't wait to see your solution to the table !!

[bainin]

The jig worked pretty good. I struggled to understand how to use it for awhile..made quite a pile of random size/taper legs...but now i got it (the wife is better at envisioning geomtetry than I am-and her help was appreciated !)

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b

[JPG]

Tapered on ALL 4 sides?