Cutting Board Finger Holds

If you wanna put a finger grip a handhold on your cutting boards, I'm gonna show you three different ways to do that. All of them done here at the router table, three different router bits we're gonna use, we're gonna do this with a cold bit. We're gonna do this with a round nose bit, also called a core box bit. And then we're gonna do this with a bowl and tray bit. Each one has a little bit different attributes starting with this coving bit. This is the easiest one to do the negative to this is that when we put this as a handhold into a cutting board, it creates a distinct front and back to the cutting board. The other two bits don't. So with this, it's a pretty simple setup. I'm just spitballing the hype for now. All we need to do is bring our fence in place and I'm gonna actually use my cutting board to position the fence. I'm gonna align the front of the fence with the ball bearing router unplugged for all this stuff. So right there, I'm using my cutting board as a straight edge. I'm up against that bearing lock that in place, the fence is gonna stay put. What will change is the height of the cutter. So when I look at this right now and if again, I use my cutting board as a gauge, I can see my depth of cut. That's not a bad first pass. What we want to do now is just a little bit of mathematics. We want to figure out where on the cutting board we would like that handhold to be. So I'm gonna set this up. So that and my approximately 11 inch cutting board, I want about a six inch slot. So I'm gonna be 2.5 inches in and 2.5 inches in. And the best way to get consistency with this. And this is gonna be the case in all three of our setups is to use stop block. So when I start there, what I'm looking at is there's my pencil line, there's the center of the bit. So a stop block is gonna go there, same going the other way, there's my line, there's the center of the bit. Stop block will go there that way that's going to prevent this from running away from you and overshoot the ends. And then also, I only have to mark one end because the layout is gonna be automatic when I do the other end. Especially important if I'm doing a mass production set up on a bunch of different cutting boards then I only have to lay it out once because the stop blocks, control the cut for all the other cutting boards. Let's get plugged in here. P it in first pass. That's what that's given me. It's just a little relief on the bottom. Not quite as deep as I wanted it to be it. So, I'm just gonna increase depth of cut. We'll do a few passes here. And as always with a router bit, it's better to do a lot of light passes than one heavy pass. Um You get much better results. Mhm It's nice. It gives your fingers a place to go and we wanna lift this up off the table or countertop. Like I said, the downside is that now pretty much has to be the back of the cutting board. We don't get the opportunity to reverse the cutting board over time because we've put those finger holes in it. It's gonna swap router bits and we'll look at a different approach to this. Now, I've swapped over to that round nose or core box bit. And with this one, we're gonna plunge down on top of it for a handhold. So again, I'm gonna lower that in the table and just kind of spitball its position to start with. Now, think about what's gonna happen. Eventually. We're gonna get the fence in place. We're gonna do this move, lift. So for my fence position on this guy, I'm gonna measure from the face of the fence to the center of the bit. That's half the thickness of my board. Check the height of my cutter. Yeah, it's a little more than I want for a first pass. Wanna be about an eighth inch or so on that first cut and it's better again to be conservative. Take too little off than, um, take too much off at a time. The next thing we need to know again is starting and stopping points. So I'm not bored, I'm 11 inches overall. So if I want a six inch handhold, 11 minus six is five, half of that is 2.5. So from this point, from the center of the cutter, which is also that line on my router fence, I'm gonna measure back the six inch handhold plus 2.5, 8.5. Same thing going this way and we're just about ready to go. Now, there's a couple of ways to play this next part. One of the things we gotta think about is if I do this plunge and this happens, I'm gonna ruin my cutting board. So one way to approach that would be I'm gonna use a push pad and I'm gonna keep that securely against the fence and I'm gonna make this cut and I'm not gonna let that happen. Ok. Another approach would be put a taller fence on your router table. So there's support up here that prevents that from tipping another approach would be put that up against the fence, grab another board. Now, when you do this, when you put this in place, don't push so hard trapping this that you're not gonna be able to move the board. We're just looking for a little insurance here and I know somebody's gonna ask about simply using a feather board. Um I don't think a feather board would give you enough lateral pressure to give you the insurance that you want. And we need to be able to slip down in between the two components and move forward. If this was a plastic feather board, I don't think it would be happy about letting you slip down and engage. So this approach I have found works the best. Then the other thing we wanna pay attention to is keeping the same face forward all the time. In this case, it's easy. There's a juice groove here. So if you don't have a juice groove, I would put a mark on here indicating that face is forward, make a cut to the same to the other end, increased up the cut on and on and on and still gonna use the push pad, get plugged in so up against the block. Mhm. That's what we have so far. Kind of cool looking. And again, with this one, now we're not distinctly creating a top and a bottom because it's in the end it's blind, it doesn't show on either face. We needed that to be a little bit deeper. So the negative to my fence set up is on my router lift. I have to move that increased depth of cut, bring this back and reset it each time. I like that just enough there you can get your fingers in there makes it a little easier to pick up the cutting board. Let's look at one more set up one more bit. I've got the bow and tray bit in the table. Let's compare this profile to this profile with a bow and tray. It's got the rounded corners on it, but it's flat across the bottom with the round nose. Bit, ironically, it's a round nose. So this is just basically a U shape. This is rounded, flat, rounded. So it gives us a little bit different look and we can treat it a little bit differently with this cutter. What we wanna do is set the fence position so that the fence is located slightly more than half the width, half the thickness of our board away from the center of the bit. So let's say you've got an inch and a half thick board. I would set this to 13 16. So in my case, I have got inch and a quarter half of that is five eights. So I'm gonna come out to about 9/16. Oops about 11/16. Now, what's different about this guy is that we're gonna plunge pass, flip, plunge, pass two passes per end and you'll see, it gives us a little bit different look to that finger profile. It's very, very similar to what we did with the round nose. Um, but it does give us a little bit different look. I can use my same stop positions and I can get away with that because I've, again, got the center line of the fence on the center line of the cutter. Let's buy a little insurance. Ok. All right. So again, we're gonna end up with both faces against the fence on each end. So it gives us just a little bit different profile than the round nose does. We're flat across the bottom instead of U shaped across the bottom. So same as before I'm gonna back my fence off, increase my depth of cut, do just a couple more passes. So with this set up because we're double passing. One thing you gotta watch for see that little high spot right there. So that tells me my stop blocks are not quite perfectly centered on the cutter. So a good approach to this would be do these cuts in a piece of scrap before you do it in your cutting boards and mess with those positions in order to get this just right. When the stop locks are perfectly located, it's gonna end and end in a perfect radius on each end. So for this one, I'll mess with my stop locks, I'll correct that what I do like about this one. I, I like the look it gives and because we're cutting, flipping, cutting, it has to come out perfectly centered with the round nose. One, if you miss your layout just a little bit because we only make one cut, the handhold might not be perfectly centered in the thickness of the board. So it's cool. Three different options to put these finger recesses in, make it a little bit easier to handle the boards. And three cool approaches on the router table to take care of it.