Intro
After making the knife, I needed a cutting board! If you give a mouse a cookie...
This is an end-grain cutting board made of cherry and maple. It could definitely be improved, but it was my first big kid woodworking project. The main problem is that I could only find a lumber yard with 1" boards which ended up warping quite a bit and I didn't have anything other than a hand plane to try to flatten them. Ideally I would have had thicker boards and a planer, but oh well. Its a learning experience (albeit an expensive one).
First Glue
These end grain gutting boards are made in a pretty clever way. If you want to make one yourself this is a good video. First you glue up boards of varying width on their long grain, then you cut that first glue up into strips and glue those strips together to expose their end grain. The end grain is better for cutting on and more attractive. There's this cool software for planning out all of these glue ups here. It even accounts for the wood lost to the saw kerf.
Second Glue
After the glue dried I needed to cut everything into 1.5" strips. In order to get straight cuts I made a large crosscut sled. This is the point where the wood started to warp. I think If I had paid more attention to the grain direction in the first glue up it would have warped less, but still. The wood was adjusting from the moisture level at the lumber yard and I should have let it equalize and then planed everything flat before continuing. But anyway, full steam ahead.
The crosscutting went pretty well! I'm definitely still new to the table saw so making the jig was an entire project on its own. That sled led me to build a much more precise smaller one. After I had all of the strips cut it was just a matter of flipping every other one and gluing them up. At this point the warping was so bad that I had to organize the strips by curvature and glue them in the order that fit together best...
Finishing
Next I had to plane the whole thing flat and cut the handles. For a finish I used a mix of beeswax an mineral oil. That's what everybody on the world wide web recommended, but I didn't really like how glossy it turned out. By now the oil has worn off a bit and I prefer the bare wood.
More Photos
