The legs are frame-and-panel assemblies. They were a bit of work to build because of the tapers and X-brace cutouts. They’re made of sassafras except for the brace, which is 1/4" plywood. 

 

My boards were just wide enough to yield two legs side by side. I used my tapering jig to cut the long sides. 

 

I also used it to cut the ends. They’re cut at 10-degrees because the legs are designed to splay out 10 degrees from vertical.. 

 

 

 

While I had the stops on the jig set up, I also cut the leg offsets. 

 

 

Then I discovered that I had measured the 10-degree for the top of the legs from the back edge, not the front edge. Fortunately, that meant I had cut the legs too long, so I was able to trim off the excess.

 

Before I went any further, I tested the pivot point. I had to make one small adjustment to its position. 

 

 

Then I drilled the pivot point holes in the legs and outer support structure beams. (Note that I did this before I glued up the support structure. In this blog series, I’m taking a few liberties with the construction sequence.) 

 

 

With that done, I started working on the leg rails and their attachment (dowels) to the legs. I made a simple jig from rail and brace panel cutoffs. It insets the rails 1/4" from the legs’ front edges. The rail parts of the jig aren’t glued to the plywood section. I needed to separate them later.

I used the jig to mark the dowel hole locations and drilled them on the drill press. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I used the rail parts of the jig to drill the matching holes in the rail ends.  

 

 

A dry fit confirmed that everything was good. 

 

 

The next step was routing the grooves for the sides of the X-brace panel in the legs. I’ve said before that, If I’m going to do something stupid, it’s going to be on the router table. It took me three attempts to get this simple task right. After my first pass, I noticed that the groove depth varied from leg to leg, and from one end of the leg to the other. I had apparently failed to lock the router to the table, so the router was slowly sinking as I worked. (I don’t have a dedicated router, so I install and remove it as needed.) I locked the router and made a second attempt. This time I heard loud chattering and then saw the end of the bit break through the leg. (That was surprising and disconcerting.) I had apparently failed to tighten the collet sufficiently. 

 

I patched the hole, glued filler strips into all the grooves, and recut them. Finally, I got it right.

 

 

I did another dry fit. 

 

Now it was time to cut the rounded triangles out of the panel to form the X-braces. 

 

I drilled all the corner holes in all four leg panels at once. Then I chose one panel as a template, routed out the triangles in connect-the-dot fashion, and used the template and a flush trimming bit on the router table for the other three panels. (I used a jigsaw to rough cut the other panels before routing.) 

 

 

 

 

Drilling the corner holes in all the panels at once seemed like a good idea at the time, but it wasn’t. The panels weren’t completely flat, and I didn’t clamp them securely while drilling. I got some tear-out where the drill broke through the undersides of some of the holes. 

 

To finish the braces, I smoothed the edges with 1/8” roundover bit. They turned out okay, but not perfectly. In addition to the tear-out, some of the triangle outlines weren’t perfectly smooth because their sides didn’t hit the circles at just the right points. I sanded out as many of the flaws as I could, patched the tear-out with wood filler, and declared the braces good enough for shop tables. (They would not be acceptable for an actual furniture project.) 

 

Before I could glue the legs together, I added the spacers to half the legs. 

 

I also needed to round over the top inside corners of the legs so they wouldn’t contact the undersides of the tabletop frames as the legs rotated. I started by clipping the corners on the table saw. 

 

 

Then I clamped all the legs together and hand sanded them smooth.

 

I used the 1/8” roundover bit on all leg edges, and I was ready for glue up.

 

 

The glue up was uneventful, and I had a set of finish-ready legs. That was a long time coming. 

By the way, cutting the triangles out of the braces saved me a hair over one lb. per leg, or two lbs. per table. The legs look cool, but I’m not sure that weight saving justified the extra effort.