I recently joined a local crafts co-op to take some classes and learn woodworking. I had done some building construction as a teenager, but those projects were different than the type of craftsmanship I’m hoping to develop now, and involved a different set of tools and responsibilities. Some tools, like a planer, weren’t needed because you don’t need the boards of a deck to be perfectly level (you tilt the entire walking surface slightly to drain rain away from the house anyway), and I never learned how to replace the blade on a table saw because it wasn’t my saw to begin with.
Anyway, I wanted to chronicle my first solo project: a cutting board. I like a big cutting board. Nothing more annoying to me than having food fall off a tiny cutting board, or feeling like I need to constantly move cut-onions off the board to make room for the peppers. Unfortunately, I own 3 small cutting boards, and one that is TOO large, and doesn’t fit in my cabinets. Currently it lives on my counter. This would be okay if it wasn’t also ugly. So my mission was to make something slightly shorter and more beautiful.
Selecting the Style
First step was to figure out what I wanted my board to look like. This was important to figure out (1) how many different colors I need and (2) how much wood of each color to buy. At this point I also learned of the two main styles of cutting board. The styles are defined by which part of the wood is used as the cutting surface: face grain and end grain.
In face grain, the fibers of the wood (grain) are running parallel to the surface. If you were to cut through the face with a knife, you would be cutting the fibers in half. Face grain boards are harder & more durable, since the cutting surface resists the knife well. It lends itself well to striped patterns, since you can cut long pieces of wood at a time.
Using a board’s end grain, the fibers of the wood run perpendicular to the surface, like looking down at a hairbrush. A knife would be cutting between the fibers. End grain boards are a bit gentler on knives and don’t dull them quite as fast. They are also a bit more tricky. The ends of the fibers are prone to chip out during construction, and they soak up a lot more oil/wax. You’ll also need to re-wax them occasionally. Since the surface area of each piece will be much smaller, end grain boards will often have more complicated patterns. If you have to join several pieces in a row anyway just to get one strip that spans the length of the board, you might as well make something interesting out of it.
I wouldn’t want to mix which grain I used, for fear that heat expansion/contraction would make the board warp in different directions and crack. I ended up choosing the edge version of face grain for a striped board. One reason I chose the edge over using the wide face is because my boards were thinner than the 1.5″ tall I wanted the final cutting board to be.
I decided to keep it somewhat simple, and use three colors: a dark wood, and white wood, and a bit of red. I made an excel workbook to play around with different strip configurations until I found one I liked.
Getting the Wood
I found my local hardwood lumber yard and chatted with the owner to get some ideas on good wood to use since I don’t know anything about nice wood.
I chose Peruvian Walnut (Dark), Makore (red) (Mack-oh-ray), and a hard white Maple. The Peruvian Walnut was a lot cheaper than the local Walnut here on the east coast. If Biden wants me to buy American he should consider providing subsidies. Note how “light” the walnut looks here when dry. I was skeptical but it turned out to be my favorite of the three.
I could seriously spend a whole day in here looking at all the crazy wood. I thought it was better to not go nuts buying expensive wood for my first (likely failure) project. Still. Check out purple heart, and zebrawood. I was tempted to go padauk (puh DOOK, look how bright!) for the red, but when cut it tends to throw powder everywhere that will stain lighter woods. Not great for a communal workspace.
Cleaning it up – S4S
Now that I had my boards, I needed to clean them up. Specifically, I needed to get them “S4S”, or straight on 4 sides. Here’s what they looked like to start:
Raw, the boards will have gaps, be twisted or warped. If I tried to cut them to cutting board size now my cuts wont actually be straight (the sides resting on the table will not be flat) and would have big gaps. To get them S4S I used two tools: a jointer and a planer.
The jointer is used to make a perfect 90 degree angle between two adjacent sides of the board (one wide side and one short side). It does this by first making one wide side perfectly flat. Next, the flat side is pushed up against the fence – the back wall of the jointer – which is machined to be a perfect 90 degrees from the cutting surface. Then the jointer cuts the second side to be perfectly perpendicular to the first side.
Then the board is passed through a planer, jointed-flat-side down. The planer cuts the third side to be perfectly parallel to the first (opposite) side. In doing this the third side also becomes perpendicular to the second side.
Finally, I used a regular table saw to cut the final edge straight. Since the surface against the table saw’s fence is straight, and the surface against the top of the table are straight, I know the final cut will be straight.
During this time I also answered the question why I couldn’t just use a jointer to make the board S4S. After all, if I could make the first two sides perpendicular, why couldn’t I just keep rotating the board, making each subsequent pair of adjacent sides a perfect 90 degrees to each other? Wouldn’t that make the entire board straight? It turns out no. While all four sides would be 90 degrees (the end would look perfectly square), the top and bottom of the board would not be parallel. Think of the wood being slightly wedge-shaped down the length of the board. Thus, the planer.
Cutting my Slices
Next it was time to measure and cut my boards into the strips I’ll need to make the actual cutting boards. Attentive readers will notice a plural in the previous sentence. I actually fucked this step up. When doing my measurements I switched the width and depth. I planned on making three boards: 1 horizontal-striped and 2 slightly smaller vertical-striped boards. Of course, only after I cut most of the boards down to lengths (but not yet into strips) did I notice this. So, I had just enough wood salvageable to make one full board the size I wanted. The rest of the chunks will live in my car for a future project.
I used a table saw to slice my boards into strips. However, since I did it kind of jankily by hand, the thin pieces had a tendency to wiggle a bit coming out the other end of the saw. While the original boards were straight, I no longer had confidence these strips were. Good news is that since I’m going to have to re-S4S the entire cutting board later, I only need to flatten the two sides of each strip that would be touching another strip. So, back to the planer they go in batches!
Glue-up
With my strips ready, it was time to glue them together. Tightbond III is waterproof, what I want for a cutting board, but takes the longest time to set. Time to clamp.
Cleanup glue, Cut Square
The next day I got the clamps off and scraped off enough dried glue to run it through the planer, and cut the sides back to square.
Learning: wipe as much glue off while its still wet. I ended up cutting a few gouges into the wood while trying to chisel off the dried glue. Not too big a deal for this, but if I was making something more delicate I would have been in trouble.
Glued up not too bad right? No gaps at all between strips, which seemed like the easiest thing to ruin the project. Someone cut some chunks into it with a chisel though, so I’ll need to run it through the planer a few times to cut off enough wood to remove them.
Juice Groove, Handles, Rounding Corners
I accidently rest-of-the-owl’ed it here and forgot to take pictures between these steps. I did three things: cut a juice groove into one side, cut handholds into the bottom, and rounded off the edges/corners.
For all three of these steps I used a table router. A router is the result of someone taking a perfectly good table, cutting a hole in the center, and sticking a drill up through the bottom of the hole. Except the drill bit has sharp blades on it.
For the juice groove, it would have been more intelligent to use a plunge router. A hand tool that could ride on top of the board, and push a cutting tool down into the board while I drag it along. Unfortunately, the shop didn’t have any bits that fit the plunge router they had, so I made due. To cut my juice groove, I fit the table router with a rounded bit to cut a semicircular depression. I set my fence to be 2 cm from the blade, turned my board upside down, dropped gently lowered it onto the router bit, and then sort of slid it side to side to cut a long gouge down one side of the board roughly 2 cm from the edge. I rotated and did this three more times to make a square border.
If this sounds jank as hell you don’t know the half of it. The first time I tried it I accidently cut the gouge all the way to the edge. This made it less of a juice catch and more of a drainage gutter. I decided to run it back through the planer to thin down the board back to flat before trying a second time. My final board lost about 1cm of height from this mistake. Anyway, this method left two other imperfections. The corners where the gouges met didn’t line up perfectly so I had to go back and eyeball cut just a bit more (remember, the whole time the cutting is happening, the board is upside down so I can’t actually see what’s happening). One of the corners was cut a little too far. Also, there’s a small nob in the center of one groove where the router cut out an extra section from when I placed it down at an angle by accident. Imperfections make life more interesting.
I used a dome-shaped router bit to cut these handholds into the bottom side. Done similar to the groove, but since I was cutting the side, I could see a bit better what I was doing and had a bit more control. Even so, you can see a small black mark on the right where I moved too slowly while cutting, and the non-cutting part of the spinning router bit gave it some friction burn.
Finally, I used a roundover bit to round off all the edges of the board. That part went pretty smooth actually!
Sanding
Time to sand. Sanding was done in a few stages by grit (roughness). Lower grit is courser/rougher. I did 120, 150, and 220. Between every grit I misted the whole board with water to “raise the grain”. This lets the looser fibers of wood on the surface curl up so they can be cut off with the next sanding. If I don’t do this, the final board will tend to get rough or fuzzy feeling after the first time I wash it.
Finishing – Oil and Wax
After I took it home, the penultimate step is to soak the board in a food-safe mineral oil to clog up the pores and stop bacterial growth.
The next morning, I came back to wipe off the excess oil. The final step was to rub down the board a with beeswax mixture to help keep out moisture.
Learning: Wear gloves when applying foodsafe board wax designed to withstand washing with soap and water. You will not be able to get it off by washing your hands with soap and water.
Finished Product
And after drying a bit and wiping off the excess wax, here it is! Pretty happy with how it turned out for a first attempt. There’s a few imperfections that only I would notice, and a couple more that Giselle could notice, but it was a good learning experience. I probably should have done a test run using just one type of cheaper lumber, but I’m happy overall. Really pleased with the peruvian walnut in particular. I’m also going to take one of the laser cutting courses and learn how to burn some hipster branding into the corner for style. Maybe I can try to hide a zergling in the handle.
I still have a bunch of material and wax left so I’ll definitely do some more attempts and try to experiment with design a bit more next time. For now, I’m going to take a break and explore the lathe. Giselle has requested I try to make her a big salad bowl.
Thanks for reading.