More Cutting Boards

  Last Christmas I made 10 cutting boards.    I loved doing it.    I mean how difficult can you imagine it

to be to just glue some hard wood boards together and smooth them out.   While I had thought that I had plenty to pass around at Christmas time last year, I discovered that before we had finished singing "Silent Night" 10 cutting boards was not going to be enough.     So I made some promises that someday I would make a few more.        Now whenever I am working on a project and have a few small scraps left over, I toss em into a pile in the corner of the shop thinking "someday that will be a cutting board" (or two).

    This week I dug into that pile and pulled out a little cherry wood, some walnut, ash, and hard maple.   I just randomly put together some kind of pattern and tried to make all the edges smooth so that they would glue together nicely.   (Hmm is "nicely"  even a word?)

      I have this jig with two sides that are angled at 90 degrees.   I put some wax paper down first which helps keep glue off my jig.   I align my pieces the way I want them on top of that wax paper.  I will admit that I get very sloppy with my glue -   always making sure that I am using a water resistant glue.   I don't know if it is important at this phase, but I try to keep things square and flat.   This jig helps hold all those pieces in place until the glue is dry. 

   Once dried,   I run this little glued up chunk of wood through the planer to flatten both sides.      Then I sand and sand and sand to get the surface as smooth as a   -  well you know. 

  I made these a little thinner than the ones that were made at Christmas time.    I actually think this will be a little more light weigh and handier. 

     Like before, I drilled a little finger hole and I rounded over the edges.      When I was done I used an oil product that is food safe and applied a couple of coats to the wood.    These cutting boards turned out nice.    These are about 5/8's of an inch thick which makes them a little lighter and easier to store.   

   One thing that I did this time was branded each of the cutting boards.   I'll probably question myself before doing this again.    (Most likely just devalued this project from a cutting board to a trivet.)     Anyway making cutting boards is one way to clean up a lot of scrap pieces  (my goal for 2017)  and it is fun to do.    I have a feeling that if  you are on my Christmas list for 2017,  it is possible you could see another cutting board under the tree.