We collaborated with some new clients about the prospect of making a butcher block counter top for their kitchen that was undergoing massive overhaul. We got together and walked through the various approaches to building a wood counter top as well as the local wood species options they had at their disposal. We settled on an end-grain top made from cherry. The finished counter top will measure 62.5″ long x 50″ wide and roughly 2″ thick. Next we moved onto finish options and the clients really liked the idea of using food-grade mineral oil and local beeswax. They understood that this would entail periodic maintenance, but they loved the warm organic feel it would bring to their kitchen as they love to cook and entertain. The clients shared an “inspirational concept” that they put together for their remodel, and it was great to get a feel for how our piece would fit in.
Given the timelines for their remodel, we jumped right in. The first step was to dimension the cherry into smaller pieces that would then form the counter top. The clients wanted to have the pieces interlace (or finger) to give the top an classic butcher-block look so we broke the rough lumber into smaller pieces that would then be surfaced and broken down even further.
With the pieces in workable lengths, the first step was to use the jointer to create a flat reference surface to build from. This is done by taking successive passes, shaving off a 1/16th of an inch at a time, until the boards are dead flat. You can see the flat surface once the board is flipped over.
Then with one flat surface, we continued on the jointer to make the edge a perfect 90 degrees (perpendicular) to the newly created face. You can see in close-up picture that when the flat surface is placed up against the fence the edge that appeared to be relatively straight is anything but.
Now it’s time to head to the planer where we do two things… 1) make the top and bottom surfaces perfectly parallel and 2) we make all the boards a uniform thickness. Everything being the same thickness will be really important when we go to glue this whole thing together. Oddly, many hours later, you end up with a stack of boards that looks very similar to the stack you started with (or at least it does to the untrained eye).
Now the beauty AND the pain of bespoke woodwork is you get to make tons of choices that help you personalize the work. Our clients had made many choices so far to get us to this point and next on the list was how to handle the contrast between sapwood versus heartwood. Cherry has a slight color variation between the two… not as pronounced as walnut, but certainly noticeable. So the question at this point is A) minimize the contrast in the final piece or B) optimize for contrast. There is no wrong answer here, some people like the cleaner look of uniform heartwood, while others like the unique feel of the interplay between the two. So we sent a sample picture to help them to make the call.
The decision was taken to minimize the sapwood so with that in mind we took a final pass on the planer and moved to ripping the boards on the table-saw to be 2 3/16″ wide (which when oriented with the edge-grain up and sanded smooth will leave us with a counter top approximately 2″ thick). We also measured the final thickness of the pieces using a digital caliper and determined the thickness to be 1 13/16″. It was during this process that we received a visit from our shop helper, Midge, whose favorite thing is cleaning up sawdust.
The next step is to layout the boards for glue-up and make sure this ends of each board square to the surface. This step is done on the miter saw (after truing it to be perfectly 90 degrees) and ensures that the butt joints come together with minimal separation.
On to the glue-up… This is a pretty hectic process because you need to make sure that boards are not only flat, but that you have a solid joint on multiple surface orientations. To aid us in the this process, we built glue-up frame and laid down a piece of parchment paper to keep the wood from sticking to the frame once we added all the glue. It was pretty intense for a few minutes, but in the end, glue-up #1 of 7 was complete.
On to glue-ups 2, 3, 4 and 5…
Once all the glue is dry, each piece is sanded to knockdown the cured glue. Then each is run through the jointer to produce a flat reference surface before passing through the planer to produce uniform pieces that are completely flat.
Whenever someone asks me what I’ve been up to, I always say, “making sawdust” Most people just chuckle and move on, but truth be told… most of the time we make a tremendous amount of sawdust. We use it for compost, filling holes, fixing the walking trails on our farm, but in this case, we used some of the sawdust from this project as mulch on our blueberries, aronia berries and our newly planted mint & lemon-balm bed.
As we are getting ready for glue-ups 6 & 7, we take a pass with epoxy to fill any imperfections in the surface to minimize any potential hiding places in the wood’s surface. The pieces are then sanded and passed one last time through the planer. Lastly, each edge is passed through the jointer to achieve a perfect 90 degree edge for a perfect seam. Glue-up #6 brought the 3 center pieces together, with glue-up #7 adding the two outside pieces.
Last glue-up complete and construction is complete with use of our brand new track-saw to trim the edges flush.
Last step before final sanding is to round all the edges to the 1/4″ that we agreed upon. In order to avoid tear-out (wood splintering and actually being torn out by the router) we used an old-time technique called bump routing. Bump routing takes significantly longer, because you are literally making hundreds of little bumps on all surfaces, but the end result justifies the time expenditure… and you don’t have to deal with the screaming and yelling of your spouse when you have some unexpected tear-out (not that this would ever happen).
Here is the final pieces, sanded and awaiting our house butcher-block finish.
