Lathe tapering tool

[capncarl]

I'm trying to change up the tapered legs on my Tiny Tables a bit by creating a turned tapered leg. I've made a few tiny tables using turned legs of various lengths and really don't like turning a 30" long 1 1/4" square piece of stock tapered down to between 3/4" and 1/2" on the small end. It's extremely hard to get 4 legs reasonably close, and when the wood piece breaks it scares the mud out our you.

Ive been toying with the idea of using a jig on the lathe similar to the jig others use to mount a router above the lathe to cut slots in pieces with, but instead of a router use a belt sander mounted on a plate that slides up and down the piece. I've seen somewhere a belt attachment on a lathe I think was building baseball bats but I can't find it online.
Thoughts?
capncarl

[Bill in Buena Park]

Why not try the router approach? Seems you could put a carriage together similar to the router dado jigs, and mount it over the lathe so that one end is downslope of the other. How much downslope could even be adjustable if you could vary the height of the mounts on either end.

[capncarl]

My Tiny Tables legs are pretty fragile for the wood lathe, being only 1/2"-3/4" on the small end, and are commonly made from questionable materials for wood lathe turning. Sinker Cypress is really light weight and extremely brittle, antique pine is extremely brittle. All are very dry. After I turn them reasonably within shape I hand sand them to the final shape. I figured that if I have to spend 20 minutes hand sanding why not do the whole job with a capable sanding machine and cut out the first 30 minutes of pucker factor trying to shape the leg. At about 1 hour per leg X 4 legs per table I want to find a better way.

[Charlie R]

Try a sanding disk chucked in an electric drill. Spin your workpiece in the lathe and sand away. After making the first leg use it to make a profile template to do the rest.