We were contacted by our client to build three cutting boards for their home. The first, would serve as their main cutting board. The second, to sit near a prep sink. Finally, the third would be for use in their home bar.
The clients were interested in having end-grain boards for the two primary boards as they are by far the best for regular cutting and chopping. We discussed options for the types of wood that we could potentially use and we settled on Hard Maple for the primary board, White Oak for the second board and the third board they left up to our discretion.
The white oak for this project was from a tree that was standing dead near the shores of Lake Clinton outside of Lawrence, KS. The tree was milled by Tom the Sawyer (www.tomthesawyer.net) on February 17, 2013 for a family that never got around to using the wood and was happy for it to find a new home. We brought the wood to our shop and have put this beautiful wood to good use on several projects. You can see below the tree on milling day back in 2013 and then as it arrived in our shop. The maple came from northeastern Kansas City
The first step in getting things rolling was to break the maple and oak down into usable pieces and prepare them to be joined together. As boards dry they can move a lot… shrinking, twisting and bending as the moisture escapes from them. When starting with rough-sawn lumber (meaning lumber straight from a saw mill) you begin by breaking them down into pieces of appropriate size for the project. There’s a little bit of art involved in how you decide to break down a piece in order to preserve the maximum thickness of the board. In the pictures below the rough maple boards had a bit of a bow to them, so by cutting them in the middle we were able to remove some of the bow which will help as we flatten them in the next step.
The oak boards however had a bit of cupping, so we marked a chalk line down the middle and used the band saw to slice them in half, eliminating the majority of the bend.
With the first phase of breaking down the boards complete, the next step is to make a one side of the boards dead flat to provide a reference surface. This is done using a machine called a jointer. You take several passes over a spinning spiral cutter head and when you are done, you have a completely flat surface.
With one flat reference service established, the next step was to make both faces parallel and then remove material until we reach the desired board thickness. This process is done by taking successive passes on a machine called a planer. You can see in the pictures below the top face slowly becoming parallel with the bottom face that we had flattened previously
Now our recently flattened boards return to the jointer to make the edge perpendicular to the face. This is important for two reasons. One it allows us to have a straight edge with which to cut the boards into smaller pieces on the table saw. The second being that it allows us to glue two perfectly flat surfaces together when we are doing assembly.
With the boards cut to the desired dimensions it was time for the glue-up.
Once the glue had dried we broke down the clamps and removed the excess glue. We then took a quick pass on the jointer and planer to ensure the boards were dead-flat. Then the maple board and the oak board began down separate paths. The large maple board was actually glued up previously in two pieces to make it easier to flatten post glue-up. So the next step for this board was back into the clamps.
The 12″ x 9″ oak board however, was ready for its next phase. After it was flattened, one edge was straightened revealing the end-grain pattern that we will see later in the finished board. Then 2″ strips were cut using our cross-cut sled and a cross-cut blade on the table saw. Ripping and Cross-cutting are two types of cuts you can make on wood and each is best done with a saw blade tailored for that purpose. Cross-cutting is cutting across or perpendicular to the grain and uses a blade with many fine teeth. Ripping is cutting with the grain and uses a blade with fewer teeth designed to clear the stringy fiber that can be released when cutting in this way.
We continued to cut 2″ strips of white oak and flipped them on their end to assemble the board which was then glued and clamped over night.
The next day we removed the clamps and sanded the glue and any bumps away with a belt sander. After that was done we repeated the slicing process with the large maple board and clamped it to dry over night. We were given carte blanche on the smaller 7″ x 9″ cutting board for the bar so we started by gluing up two of several ideas we had so that the client could have some choices. The first of these is a combination of maple and oak using wood from the trees we used to build the other boards. The second is all hard maple, but there is some interesting side grain that has a little bit of a curly maple vibe to it. Both boards will look much different once the glue is removed and they are finish sanded.
With all the boards finally glued and rough sanded, it was time to round over the edges on each cutting board using a trim router. Then the really sanding marathon could begin. Hours later, the sanding finished with a quick pass of 400 grit over all the boards making them ready the next step.
The client selected the small board that we had inlaid with some purpleheart. Purpleheart is a tree found in Central and South America and has the unique feature of having wood that is a beautiful purple in color (if only everything had names that made such sense). The final step was to coat each board with 5 or 6 coats of food-grade mineral oil and then apply a final coat of our house-made beeswax/mineral oil combo. These boards turned out to be gorgeous and will be put to good use by this culinary-focused family.
