If you have come to this post looking for an easy, no-hard-work method to scale furniture, I’m afraid you’re going to be disappointed. There is no magic bullet. No simple number that can be used as a multiplier to arrive at the final sizes needed to enlarge or scale down a plan. However, there are a couple ways that work if you put in the time and effort.The easiest, most simplistic method to scale furniture is to take a scaled drawing to your local copy shop and have them enlarge the piece to the size you are after. The drawings on the blanket chest in our August 2009 issue are to scale, so you would need to take the drawings to your copy shop and have them enlarge the plans by a certain percentage. To adjust the plan from a box size of 32” to the larger box size of 42”, you should ask that the plan be enlarged by 31.25 percent (32” x 1.3125 percent = 42”). In turn, the other measurements would also adjust accordingly. The overall height adjusts from 20” to 26-1/4” and the feet go to 5” from 3-3/4”.While this option allows you to work from a drawing, I find it much more helpful to learn how to scale from photos – photos that are shown with full, mostly front-on views and not necessarily shown from angles. To do this, I use ratios of measurements taken off the photo.As an example, the blanket chest photo I’m using measures 6-3/4” wide and in the description of the chest the actual width is 53”. To find other measurements along the width of the chest such as the width of one drawer, I’ll set up a ratio of 6.75/53. I can use this ratio to find the width of any other part of the chest so long as I take all my measurements from the same photo.If the width of one of the long drawers in my photo equals 2-1/4”, then I would set up the following where X is the actual width of the drawer front: