Building a new front entrance for my home required milling several 8/4 boards of sub-premium mahogany for the structure. Most of the cutoff pieces were about two feet long, which I gave to friends for small projects. But the grain pattern of one piece caught my eye so I resawed it.  The book-matched pattern and chatoyance of the opened board were stunning.  I decided they would make a great top for a small splay-legged table I’d seen in an article by Garrett Hack a few years ago. A 3-foot long 8/4 board of furniture grade mahogany provided the wood for the aprons and legs on the table.

This small table combines some uncommon features that make it interesting. The legs are tapered on all four sides rather than just two.  Instead of being straight the legs splay outward a few degrees, giving the table a “stance” that adds visual interest. Finally, the apron has cock beading along the lower edge, a nice detail that also conceals any gap in the tenons.

I should have done a better job of photographing the process while building, but making splayed legs tapered on all four sides was a new challenge that kept me fully engaged. I will give an overview of the process here and would be happy to send a PDF of Garrett Hack’s original article to anyone who wants more details about the build.  

The first step was making a full sized three-dimensional pattern from which to lay out the legs. I cut it a little oversize on the bandsaw, then jointed two adjacent sides and finished the other two sides with a hand plane.

The leg pattern made it easy to lay out the four tapered legs adjacent to one another, alternating tops and bottoms of the legs on a single board to save wood. (Actually, I cut five legs anticipating errors which for once did not materialize. So now I have an extra leg hanging on the wall like real cabinetmakers!)After cutting the marked legs on my bandsaw and then jointing the cuts, I used the pattern leg again as a tapering jig for the other two sides of each leg, which made the time spent making the pattern seem very worthwhile.

Mr. Hack used a four degree splay (94 degree angle), which I reduced to 93 degrees, even though my table is wider than his original.  This makes the splay somewhat subtle, which is how I like to go the first time. If I did another table the legs would have more splay.

Naturally the aprons and their tenons had to be cut at the same angle, which I did on the table saw with my seldom-used tenoning jig. The mortices were mainly cut with the dado cutter on the table saw with the bottom edges squared up by hand.

This was a fun project that included some learning and proved to me that using scrap does not mean the final product has to look like…scrap.