One small project that’s been lingering for a month or so is a narrow stand to hold some decorative stuff (such as a plant or worse). I planned to make a three-legged round-topped staked version. The difficulty is that the proportions don’t really conform to most furniture projects, so I wasn’t really sure what would look halfway decent.

Fortunately, there is a solution, described in The Anarchist’s Design Book, also referenced in a recent LAP blog post. You make a quickie half-scale model to see if it works, and if it does, transfer the angle(s) from that. So I made myself a little r = 2.5″ top and set about getting some wire hangers to dismantle in order to mock up the legs.

That’s where I came across two problems. First, there’s sort of a shortage of wire hangers in this house, and an acute shortage of ones that aren’t bent all to hell, which would make it difficult to get a halfway accurate resultant angle with the long legs that this project requires. Second, I had this difficulty: How would I get a better feel for how the legs would look meeting the top, as well as the overall weight of the legs, taking into account some of the thickness? I also didn’t know what length of leg I wanted.

So maybe I don’t have a lot of straight wire hangers around, but I do have a lot of narrow offcuts of wood lying all over the place. I decided to try drilling a hole in the end and stuffing a smaller piece of wire hanger in there:

And then, I wasn’t sure of the inset from the edge where the legs should be attached. Again, because this is not a chair, I wasn’t really sure what might be appropriate. So I drilled two sets of holes in the top so that I could play with both:

At least the sightlines for this thing are really easy to determine.

With this in place, I attached scale 30″ legs in the outer holes to see how this would look:

As I suspected, it was awkward. There were problems viewing from different angles and the proportions are also a bit unfortunate. I tried putting the legs into the inner set of holes, and that was also strange.

So then I tried scale 26″ legs, attached to the inner holes:

This seems to work better. It looks like a stand, I guess. Hopefully it does not look like a stool, though it might actually be able to perform that function.

In any case, before getting the resultant angle, I just tried fixing the wires in place with “Shoe Goo” to see if I can keep them from wriggling around so much. (Others use epoxy, but I don’t have any of that right now.)