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Once I was happy with all the joinery, I was finally able to taper the legs. I made a simple taper jig to do this. I have tried the cheap taper jigs you see everywhere but I never felt totally in control as I pushed the workpiece past the blade – there is no way to hold the stock that feels comfortable to me. Making a jig like this is really simple, and it’s worth the time spent.

Before I ran one of my legs through on this jig, I ran a practice piece of scrap. It’s a good thing I did, because I hadn’t considered that the pawls on my splitter would cause a problem. As the taper moves past the splitter, it acts as a wedge between the splitter and the outside pawl. This eventually started binding and felt like it was about to start twisting. I stopped the cut and figured out how to fix the problem – simply holding that pawl up with a spring clamp eliminated the problem.

The legs taper from 1-3/4″ down to 1″. When it came time for glue-up, I glued them up in two steps (made the two sides, then assembled them with the front/back pieces).

Then I cut the top panels down to final dimension, and planed a bevel on the bottom edges. I did this by marking layout lines on the sides & bottom of the top panels, then using a hand plane to cut down to these lines. I started out with a No. 4, but then I sharpened up a No. 5 and I was surprised at how quickly I was able to cut these bevels. Of course, I heated up the shop at bit in the process!

You can see here how the corner looks as I’m planing down to the layout lines. This resulted in nice, crisp corners all around. I don’t think I could have done as well with the table saw.

So… this is what it ended up looking like:

I tapered the ends down from 3/4″ to 1/2″. I thought about taking it down to 3/8″, but I thought it might look TOO thin — plus I worried about exposing my breadboard mortises! I think this looks OK, but you really can’t see the bevel unless you are looking from a low angle.

I resawed and jointed/planed all the stock for the drawers, planed them about 1/8″ over thickness, and left them alone for a few days so they would have time to quit moving. I then finished thickness planing them and they were ready to start making the drawers.

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