General Woodworking

[Paulquinn83]

Hi, can anyone steer me in the rite direction?
I'm staring a project and it will have cabriolet legs and I'm not sure how to layout or scale these legs so that the curves will look the way they should for the size of my project.

[dpuskar]

I suggest you Google cabriole Leg there is a lot of info.

[RussBoyd]

Here is a link to one of our members posts a while back. This was all I needed to do my first set. They were fun. http://community.woodmagazine.com/t5/Info-Sharing/How-I-make-Cabriole-Legs/m-p/100138#M371

[ynoT]

Well, you want to make sure they are in proprtion to the whole project.

There are many images of furniture made with those legs. Browse them and see how they compare to your project.

Once you find the one, than go for it.

Tony

[Paulquinn83]

Thanks for the info but not enough to solve my problem. Maybe I didn't word it correctly but what I'm looking for is more about how to determine how to design a leg for a particular project. How to draw the curves ext. My leg blanks will be 2.1/4" square and about 20" long. To save time on making 3 to 4 poplar blanks to see will the leg look well I would like to make 1 full scale template and go from there.

[kmealy]

There was an interesting class on this at WIA a couple of weeks ago.  The answer is there is no right answer.  It depends upon the style and scale of the piece.    The presenter had a set of leg patterns with various degrees of curve and it depended a lot upon which type of piece it was going on.

Maybe try Google's Sketchup Library for patterns?

[dave n]

When laying them out I make sure I cut the leg with an area of straight grain running from top to bottom. If you have short grain there is a good chance the leg will break.