So what can you do when you spend 16 hours over two days in the shop? Well you can do several things, one is rough mill some stock to width, second you can drink more Gatorade than you thought humanly possible, and three you can make a really unimpressive MDF template. How impressive it is, probably depends on who you ask. The general public would probably say it’s just a board with some curves on it. I’d like to think that a skilled woodworker can look at it see how much work went into making it. This little template required two jigs to produce, and it’s only 90% done. In my opinion that’s an awful lot of work, for something that won’t even end up in the finish piece, but that’s the price of taking your work to the next level.
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16 hrs worth of work to produce……
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rough milling phase one
My next project is for the kitchen, and will be my first project that incorporates lots of curves, and mortise & tenons. That’s right, I have yet to make anything that uses mortise & tenon joinery. My design is based on a photo I found on woodstore.net. My design will be a little more complicated to make, but I think it’s more aesthetically pleasing. I’m going to use Peruvian Walnut for the vertical boards, but I’m not sure what wood I’m going to use for horizontal boards. Right now, I’m considering either Purpleheart or hard Maple.
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Image courtesy woodstore.net
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SketchUp Rendering
This is my 4th cutting board, and I knocked it out in 5 days, 7 if you count the 2 days I let the wood rest. This was a quick project by my standards, but it’s possible to finish even faster. The most time consuming part of making an end grain cutting board is the final flattening. Since it’s end grain, you Cannot (I can’t stress this enough) run it through a typical planer. Thus it pays dividends to make sure the final glue up is as perfect as possible.
In my opinion, there are two ways to safely flatten the board. The first is with a drum sander, and the second is with a router sled. The drum sander yields a finished board right off the machine, but it can’t take off much material per pass. Additionally it’s not a tool found in most home shops, but if you have one it’s the best option. A router sled can remove more material per pass, but it yields a finish that requires additional refinement with abrasives. It also make a huge mess, unless you have some extreme dust collection in your shop.
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Links of interest:
- Marc Spagnuolo’s podcast about making an end grain cutting board.
- Marc’s podcast about finishing an end grain board.
- CBdesigner is a free (love that word) program I use to design boards.
Examples from the video (CBdesigner files):
I ordered some bench chisels earlier this week, but chisels aren’t very useful without a mallet to pound on them with. Instead of purchasing a mallet with my chisels, I decided to save my money and make my own. While watching a cubs game I knocked out this design in SketchUp. It’s pretty simple, the head is a lamination of 4 1/2″ thick boards, and the handle is 3/4″ thick stock rounded over with the router. The only non-trivial design element was the wedged tenon that secured the head to the handle. Thankfully fine woodworking came to my rescue with this article about wedged mortise & tenon joints.
Assembly was pretty strait forward and only took a few hours spread out over 3 days. The first evening I spent an hour or so rough milling the stock to size. I spent about two hours in the shop on the second night. I profiled the handle on the table saw using my dado blades, and then rounded over the edges at the router table. Making the head was a three step processes. The first step was to glue two 1/2″ thick boards together to make one 1″ thick board, that was then cut in half to form the two sides of the head. Step two was to route a half thickness tenon into each of the head halves. The final step was to precisely glue together the two halves forming the head with a tapered mortise in the center of it. On the final day (yesterday) I finished up, by fitting the head to the handle, & applying a couple coats of boiled linseed oil.
This is my first end grain cutting board, It’s made from hard Maple & Jatoba, and is 1-3/4″ thick by 20″ long and 12-1/2″ wide.
