End Grain Cutting Board

Final Product

Build Process

Who says convertibles aren't practical? This was made while I was still building everything in the parent's garage so had to transport everything down there first. Materials are 4/4 Paduk 8/4 Maple and 8/4 walnut

First stage was planning the pattern, I used CBDesigner for this project super cool little program to help visualize the end product I had a couple different designs planned but ended up making a wrong cut so I had to do some finagling before proceeding with the pieces I had on hand, I had cut these on my uncle's table saw and brought them back to my "shop"

Landed on the following design (I think)

First step is to glue up the edge grain design

Then plane everything flush, I didn't have a good workbench so I just used my planing board on the steps.

Once everything is dead flat you do crosscuts at whatever thickness you want your end result to be, in my case it was 1.5" thick. I however didn't have access to a table saw at this point so I ended up taking a straight edge and circular saw to it... I would highly recommend using a table saw so you don't have to spend half a day with a belt sander flattening all the minor errors out.

For the glue up you take all your pieces and flip every other one to get the pattern.

Here's the glue up after the initial cuts, you can see that my circular saw really didn't like going through 2" thick material.

Lots of belt sanding later....

it was "flat enough". I threw a chamfer on all the edges and added a bit of a lip to the center of the ends to help with picking this beast up. Here it is after that and with a bit of water on it. You want to hit any sort of cutting board with water a few times to raise the grain so that later if it gets wet it won't raise again and become rough.

After it stopped raising after water applications I put it on a drying rack and soaked it in mineral oil

reapplying after each time it soaked everything up. Once it stops drawing in oil you know it's saturated, so hit it with some bees wax and buff it out.

A few shots of the final product:

This was given to a friend for a wedding gift, hope they get many years of service out of it!