Best Weapons for Leveling Table Legs: A Drill Press and a Stick

One of the challenges with making any sort of table is getting its legs to sit flat on a level surface without rocking. I know lots of tricks for fixing the problem of tables that rock, but I’d much prefer to get it bang-on in the first place when trimming the legs.

This spring I’ve been building a lot of tables for an upcoming book (the tables are stacked up like a deadly Jenga game in our sunroom), and I started to think about the problem. Many of the tables I’m building have as many as six legs, so I wanted to mess around with trimming legs as little as possible.

At first I thought about using a laser level. That idea would work, but the setup would be quite involved to mark all the legs at one go. While in the shop that day for some reason I had my drill press table set really low for an operation, and the solution became obvious.

I put a moving blanket on the shop floor and flipped the table upside down on the floor so its feet were in the air.

Then I lowered the drill press table so it was a little lower – I cranked it so the machine’s table was 30” off the floor (taking into account the thickness of the moving blanket). Then I picked up a long stick from the scrap pile and placed it on the drill press’s table.

I shifted the stick so it touched one of the table’s upturned legs and used the stick as a ruler to mark a cutting line. Then I shifted the stick to the other side of the leg and made another mark. I rotated the table and brought each leg up to my stick.

After a lot of experimentation, I found that my shop floor isn’t level (surprise), so this technique works best if you leave the drill press in one position and move the legs to the same place each time you mark them.

After marking the lengths of all the legs it was simple work to trim them to their final length with a backsaw.

The result: six tables and about 30 legs later, all of them were perfect. No trimming or fine-tuning necessary.

— Christopher Schwarz