Making an End Grain Cutting Board

[Kyle Smith]

I think it is a law that every beginner woodworker must make a cutting board. It is similar to a machinist making 1,2,3 blocks, it touches on most of the basics, wood selection, milling, glue ups, finishing.

I started with a practice piece from some wood I think is maple that my great grandpa had stored for 70 years. This was rough 2" x 4" material he had sawn to build general purpose farm necessities. The material is very hard and I didn't care much about the carpenter ant holes as I was likely not to finish this one completely. As I got closer to finishing it I kind of like how it was turning out so I drilled out all the bad spots and installed maple dowels.

After a few YouTube videos I was ready for the real thing. The material is purple heart, hard maple, and wenge. I ended up making three as Christmas presents and made some coasters for myself from the scraps.

I gave up trying to orientate the photos, not sure why this is so difficult here. Edit: Finegrain's suggestion of MS Paint worked.

To finish the boards I submerged them in mineral oil for three days and then rubbed on 3 coats of boiled linseed oil and wax mix.

 

[Finegrain]

I gave up trying to orientate the photos, not sure why this is so difficult here.

Open your picture up in Paint.
Rotate it as desired.
Save it.

AFAICT, Paint does not try to re-interpret orientation based on the metadata in the file.

Regards.

Mike

 

[Kyle Smith]

Open your picture up in Paint.
Rotate it as desired.
Save it.

AFAICT, Paint does not try to re-interpret orientation based on the metadata in the file.

Regards.

Mike

That worked. I got frustrated as the basic editor the windows uses to open has a rotate feature, but the vbulletin software wouldn't recognize the changes. Even worse was I tried to predict which way it would rotate on upload only to be wrong like someone was just messing with me.

 

[Kyle Smith]

Those are pretty, I like the endgrain dowell "fix", sort of modern-artish. I've made 3 endgrain (large thick) tables, as you know they're a lot of work that most people don't appreciate (especially compared to non-endgrain ones). I always use weldwood plastic-resin glue on them.

An endgrain table would be neat to see, post pictures if you get a minute.

I haven't used weldwood glue why did you choose that? These are just Titebond III.

 

[Kyle Smith]

The large ones I made were about 3x3', 4" thick maple, kitchen chopping-block tables on maple stands with a drawer--will see if there's a picture around, it's been 25 years..yikes, but they're still going strong without a crack or barely a scratch.

(someone locally had a Boose endgrain top about 3'x3'x4", barely used, that they wanted to get rid of (didn't know why they wanted to keep the steel stand, but not the top, but didn't want the stand anyway, bought it for $40 (can't even buy the maple for that price) and it's been sitting in the corner for a couple of years waiting for a "project". )

3'x3'x4" is the size I have been considering, looks like a fun project.

$40 is a for sure, "Yes, I'll take it." Worst case it would make a nice little assembly table/workbench.

 

[henrya]

Those are nice boards, somewhat different in a nice way.