We were contacted to build a custom 20″ W x 18″ D x 2″ T walnut end-grain cutting board. End-grain has forever been the choice of chefs for two reasons… 1) it doesn’t dull their knives as quick and 2) it resists showing knife marks. Our end-grain boards are designed to take a beating and last a long time. End-grain is portion of the board where you can see the annular growth rings (like if you cut a cross-section). In the picture on the right below (the one of the stacked boards), the end-grain is facing you, the face grain is on top and the edge-grain is on either side of the board. Each type of grain has its own appeal and which you decide to use depends on the project.
The process starts with the wood, and we pulled two pieces of walnut from our racks and began dimensioning the lumber into the smaller pieces that will eventually form the cutting board. First step is on the chop or miter saw to cut to the pieces to rough length.
Next we move to the joiner to create a flat reference surface, and then create an edge that is perpendicular to that flat surface. Since these pieces will be glued together, cut and then glued again, it is very important that the edges are dead straight.
Here are our pieces ready to be run through the planer which will make both faces parallel and all the boards a uniform thickness. The boards are broken down further on the table saw (sorry we forgot to take a picture). Then we glued the boards in two sections (the green tab marks the section break). We do this because our planer is smaller then the final width of the board and we need this extra step to ensure that things remain flat for the next steps.
Once the glue is dry overnight, we break down the clamps, sand off any dried glue and then pass the pieces through the planer taking a very small amount of wood off the surface and giving us two flat and uniform pieces which are then glued up and left again overnight.
After the glue dried we removed the clamps and sanded both sides to remove any glue and flatten the surface for the next step. The board is then loaded into our crosscut sled and the pieces are sliced to just over the desired thickness of two inches. Crosscutting refers to cutting wood across the grain. Most of the cuts on a table saw are referred to as ripping cuts or cuts that go with the grain. There is a specific saw blade for each of these cuts. A crosscut blade (on the right) has many small teeth and produces a very fine cut with little to no tear-out when going across the grain. A ripping blade has fewer teeth and has large gullets (gaps) that allow for faster removal of material when cutting with the fibers of the grain. It is also essential that your saw blade be perpendicular to the table surface if you want to avoid lots of sanding down the road.
Once the pieces are cut, the are flipped so the end-grain is oriented up and every other piece is reversed so that the seam lines overlap for strength, much like a brick wall. Now it’s time for the third and final glue-up followed by some epoxy to fill the knot-holes and any checking (cracks) that may have occurred during drying.
Up next… trimming to size and sanding… lots of sanding