Build a Cutting Board Leveling Jig

The leveling jig is easy to make the part dimensions that I'm using here are all in the PDF for you. So what you can do is adapt this as needed for your router base. That's gonna be important thing. I'll talk about it when we get to that point. But also if you wanna work on bigger or smaller scale stuff, you can change the dimensions. So we've got a couple of different things to identify terms. We've got rails that will end up in this direction on the bench. When everything is made, there'll be another one here spanning the rails. We're gonna have a gantry and there's another component to this that the router will ride on. When all that happens, your cutting board is gonna be underneath and that's how we level it. So I just wanna make sure we're on the same page with rails dry. When you make the rails, you may wanna adjust the dimensions. I have already made this one that's a little bit taller than this one. So you can see where if I'm working with thinner stock or thicker slabs, I might want these rails to be a little bit shorter, closer to the bench or even maybe taller than this one further from the bench to accommodate different sizes of different thicknesses of boards so that the router but can reach them when we do the leveling, putting everything together is pretty easy, peasy glue and staples. But we just did is make the other rail to go with this guy. Now, the other thing it gets are these little blocks. One thing those blocks do is stiffen up this corner to make sure that we stay at 90 degrees. They also serve another purpose. And you'll see that when we get a little bit further along the Gantry component. First step is the same. The beauty of creating an L like this is that it gives you a lot of structure. We don't want this gantry to sag as we're putting the weight of a router on it. So three quarter inch plywood into this L shape that's really rigid. Now, here's the critical part, there's ar Gantry, there was my router. Our expectation is the gantry sits on the rails and we do this with the router. So the router has to be able to move freely through that Gantry. What we're gonna do is put a connector, a bridge like this. The length of the bridge is a critical component. You can't rely on my dimensions for that. Yours might be different when you cut the bridge, cut it so that it's a little bit longer than the diameter of your router base about an eighth inch oversize is going to be great when we have that, the bridge connects the rails of the Gantry. Mm. And then our last step is we need to stop here. And again, let me just put this on and then this part is gonna make more sense. Once we get to the point where we're actually using the jig, the length of this stat is equal to the outside dimensions there. Yeah. All right. My staples are just a tiny bit long. I'm gonna take care of that with a nipper could have sworn a head inch and a quarter staples in there. And I'll deal with those other long staples too before we use the jig. All right, let me get a router bit for the router and get set up here and then I can show you how we use this thing. The jig is set up. We're almost ready to cut. The jig is up. The jig is set up. So let's talk about a couple of things I referenced earlier on the rails when these little blocks went in. I said one thing they did is they rigid, they connect the vertical to the horizontal to keep that rigid. The other thing they do is they act as a stop. So when we come this way with the gantry, it can only go so far and can't fall off the end of the rails, then similarly, this piece that got fastened to the bottom of the gantry that acts as a stop. So the gantry can only travel so far in this direction. And again, can't go too far inside the rails and fall off there. This is going to act as a stop for our router. When we come back, I'll show you in a second before the router goes in there. Let's look at our bit. You don't have to have a large diameter cutter for this, but the work is gonna go faster if you do so, a three quarter inch bit would do it an inch and a half diameter bit is gonna do it faster. Now, with this other stop on the gantry, when we're set like this and I travel in this direction that acts as a stop, the bridge acts as a stop so that I can't accidentally cut into the rails. So it's all a system that comes together. The cutting board itself is locked into the table with a couple of stops here. It doesn't take a boat load to hold this in place, but you need to have something to give it lateral hold. So that as we're cutting, cutting, cutting, the cutting board doesn't move an alternative to what I've done here with T track in my bench is you could simply do a beat of hot glue around the edge to secure this to the table and then cut through the hot glue when you're done, flip it over to the other side. Now we wanna kind of find our first pass. You wanna find our first setting? So, what I'm gonna do on this router is I'm gonna push this release and right there, what that allowed the bit to do was go down until it's touching the material. What you wanna be really, really, really, really careful about is that you don't have a high spot on the board someplace. So we don't wanna start cutting and then suddenly find out we're taking like a 32nd off on one side and an eighth off on the other. So really the conservative way to go, I see, I'm not quite there. Now, I'm on the board. The conservative way to go is just let it kiss the board and in that position, Locke and then I'm gonna come back here and start my cuts. Step one, got a little bit of cutting action going on there. So this is good. Now, we have a known quantity. We know we've just kind of leveled it a little bit increased up to cut go again, little adjustment. So I think at that point, ok, the whole board has been touched and now we're ready to take this board to the sanding step and start to clean up the router passes using a random orbit sander. The leveling jig works really, really well, scale it up or scale it down depending on the size of your projects, but it's a great way, especially on ingrain cutting boards to level them out and do work that you can't necessarily do with a Planer.