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Checker Board End Grain Cutting Board
A house warming gift for my sister at her new apartment in Providence. I made her a cutting board for Christmas a few years prior, but, she never used it because she thought it “looked too nice” to scar it up by chopping on it. She just graduated medical school and is now a purported "adult", so I figured I should make her a functional cutting board. I used maple and walnut, the 2 most common cutting board woods, and arranged them in a checker board pattern. Again, an attractive enough looking board, but common enough that Kim should have no qualms putting it to use.
Required Resources: 3 hours, $40
Size: 18" x 12" x 1.5"
Materials: Walnut, Hard Maple, Titebond III (Food safe wood glue)
Finish: Howard's Butcher Block Conditioner (Canuba + Bees Wax + Mineral)
Tools: Band Saw, Jointer, Table saw, Planer Belt Sander, Orbital Sander
New Techniques: Not much new on this build. I've done checker board end grains in the past and I wasn't trying for anything ground breaking, just functional.
Lessons Learned:
Be Careful When You Glue: The final glue-up has to be done with extreme care. In this particular build, I glued up all of the strips in one glue-up. Due to the complicated nature of aligning multiple strips of material, the top face of the assembled cutting board was not even/flat. In a normal glue up, where the face grain ends up on top, this is a solvable problem: pass it through the planer. Since it was end grain on the uneven face, the planar (at least the dull table top planar that I own) was not an option. A planer with blunt blades will bog down on hardwood end grain and may blow out the grain at the tail end of the cut. Due to this limitation, sanding is the only option. A drum sander is the right tool, but at a 1k-2k, it is not in my budget at the moment. Thus, my only option was a hand held belt sander, which can handle the job, but takes forever. On this build, the final sanding step took 90 minutes. Had I been more careful on the glue up, or better yet, had done it in stages, the sanding process should take less than 30 minutes.