Tapered legs video for furniture and cabinet designs
Tapered legs provide interesting design elements
I received an email asking about tapered legs. I thought more than one person might be interested in how to make a tapered leg in SketchList 3D so I put a video onto YouTube. I just noticed that John was asking a more specific question and my answer is more generic.
Near the end of the video I show how I set the taper to go the whole length of the board by changing the top and bottom ‘shoulders’ of the board to zero. You can set them as anything. Also the amount of taper is set in degrees and the overall location is a function of the number of degrees and the length of the leg. You can taper one, two, three, or four edges. The important thing to get this to work is to pick the orientation of board which has the board surfaces facing top and bottom. That way all the edges become sides and you can apply the contours accordingly.
Experiment applying different contours – like a bull nose. At the board detail level select the surface and click Shape. Turn the square into a circle and you have a round leg – which can be tapered Also once the leg is created try stretching and shrinking it by dragging the red dots. Surprises abound!
Any questions shoot me an email.
David Rozewski
My woodworking love started in 6th grade in school shop class. I have a BS in Industrial Technology and an MBA. At my first job, I computerized a production accounting system – the results were positive, and I loved the challenges. I left the corporate world to begin woodworking full time and one of my first decisions was to use CAD for my designs. I found that CAD did not meet all my needs. I wrote a specification of what I wanted and turned it into a prototype. SketchList 3D incorporated in 2007. We completed programming and launched. Today thousands of woodworkers use SketchList 3D.
