How to Build a Cutting Board

So you wanna make a cutting board. There's a couple things we gotta do to get rolling on this one is we need to talk about what material is and is not good for a cutting board. And then it'd be good to figure out to how much material we need in order to make a cutting board. So, first off, let's talk about material. If you stick with kind of the usual suspects of North American hardwoods, you're gonna be ok. So by that, I mean, Cherry Walnut, Walnut maple hickory, what all of these have in common is that they're very close grained, colse, close grained. That means they're not porous. So materials like red oak where the pores tend to be more open. Those do not generate, make good cutting boards. The other thing these all have in common is that they're hardwoods, one word that are also hard woods tours. So of course, if we're gonna use a knife on a cutting board, we wanna make it out of something that's gonna stand up to that. So again, in the, in the category of North American hardwoods, Walnut maple, cherry hickory workout crate in the world of imported woods, woods like rosewood can work. Ok. With a little bit of an exception, rosewood is actually so hard, it can be hard on the edge of your knife. So to use this as an accent to put this in as a strip or two is gonna work out fine to make an entire cutting board out of something that hard. Like I said, it's gonna be hard on your knives. So a good way to be scientific about this is to look at what's called the Jena hardness scale. And on that Jena scale, we wanna use woods that are like in the midrange, not too soft, not too hard, just like goldilocks. We wanna have one that's just right. Um The other thing that will come up when we talk about woods like rosewood is uh when we get to the gluing step, we're gonna take another step with that material there. We'll talk about it when we get to gluing. Now, knowing what we want to end up with is how we're gonna figure out what we got to start with. So the easiest way to do this for me is to calculate board feet. So let's go through this. So that you understand this to do a board foot calculation, let's say we want to make a cutting board that's one and a quarter thick, 16 inches wide and 20 inches long. So a board foot calculation is thickness, time is with times length divided by 1 44 when thickness and inches, width and inches length and inches. So take these numbers, put them through this equation and that's gonna give you a result. That's gonna tell you how many board feet it takes to make a board that size. Once we know that, then we can look at the material that we're working with, recognizing there's gonna be some waste. So if that, whatever that number comes out to, we don't use it out to a decimal point, we have to add to it because as we cut into this stuff, we're gonna lose material to the saw curve. But we can use that to look at this pile and do a board foot calculation of what we have here and know that this exceeds that. So therefore, it's enough to make that cutting board. That's the easiest way I found to do this. What I like to do when I'm prepping the pile is throw in some extra pieces. That way I know I'm gonna have some wild cards to choose from. In other words, as I'm creating my pattern in the cutting board, I wanna have extra material so that if I choose not to use a piece, I can leave it out and I'll use it in a future cutting board. It just gives me more options as I'm laying this out. So stick with hard woods, midrange, Jenk of scale, do that board foot calculation to know if the pile you have here is big enough to make your cutting board. And from there, we can start prepping that material before we start cutting up wood and putting a board together. We got to decide what kind of board we're going to make two examples here. And really, we can divide cutting boards into these two streams. This is an edge grain board. This is an end grain board. So edge grain is just what it sounds like. I took a board and I stood it up. It's the edge that's currently vertical here. The benefit to an edge grain board is they are really, really, really easy to make with an end grain board. There are extra steps in there. We start here, but we end up here in this video. I'm gonna take you step by step through the edge grain board. There's another video that covers the end grain board. But the benefit to doing an end grain board is they wear better as a woodworker. You're probably aware that when you go to sand, end grain, anything you do to end grain is harder to do than it is to face grain or edge grain because end grain is hard. So when we make a cutting board that way, it's a surface that's gonna wear better than the edge grain board. The other thing that's crazy cool about these end grain boards is that when we make them and we manipulate the parts, you get this really neat pattern. Neither of these boards has finish on it right now. When finish hits them, they're even more dramatic than they are at this second. And that end grain board is really gonna pop when it's wet with finish. So more labor intensive, more material intensive. But it really looks amazing when it's got finish on it. And over the life of the board, this is gonna wear better than this one. What do I want from the board when it's done? How much work do I wanna put into it? That's gonna lead you to, am I making edge grain or am I making end green? We have a pile of hard wood that we're ready to convert into a cutting board. Now, before I start cutting stuff, a couple of things, when I prep my material, I like to have stuff of varying thickness and that's gonna make the board. I think more visually interesting. This is completely subjective. What I like is to have these variety of strip sizes in the board where this is going is the boards that we cut here. Remember edge grain board. So the cuts that we do here are gonna lead to these boards standing up like this. So this about 3/8 thick piece is gonna become a 3/8 thick stripe on the board. This inch and three quarter piece of cherry is gonna become an inch and three quarter stripe that's gonna become a three quarter inch stripe. So when you're prepping the material, it's nice to either resa or plain to get some material that's a little bit thinner just to throw into the mix as you're putting this together. When you set the rip fence on your saw, the number, the distance we set here becomes the thickness of your board because again, we're gonna cut this and then eventually that's gonna end up like that. Generally, I want my boards about an inch and a quarter thick when they're done. So I overshoot that just a little bit here in and 5 16 inch and three eights. So there's room for me to level that board after it's glued together and get to that final inch and a quarter thickness. So I'm gonna set my table saw and then from there, it's a very simple task. We're just gonna rip every one of these to that number. Couple of things. That piece is a happy accident. That was an off cut from when I cut the thick cherry. And as it turns out, it was big enough to bring back and send through to hit my engine 3/8. So that piece can get added to the pile stuff that I'm not keeping when I get to a board like that where it's got that big knot in it. I don't want that in the cutting board. So that's going in the discard pile. The other thing in addition to having material of varying thicknesses is having varying types of material. I wanna have some color contrast in here. So in the pile cherry hickory Walnut Maple, there's a mix of stuff. So that's gonna give me good options when I lay out the cutting board. Now, really, really, really important. The faces of these are about to become a glue surface because we're gonna do this. So next step, we need to make sure these faces are dead flat so that when we put them together, we have a good glue joint. You're not gonna have a good glue joint. If you don't have a good glue surface, here's what has to happen in this step. The faces of our boards have to get cleaned up so we can do this so we can glue everything together and have a great glue joint between those boards. We could back up the truck a little bit, a different way to do. This would be to take all of the boards before we cut them on the table, saw and clean up the faces. Then we're, we've already done this step for me. What I don't like doing it. So it's a little George thing is I would rather only clean up the faces I know I need. In other words, if a board is six inches wide and I'm only gonna get two rips out of it, I don't wanna bother planing or sanding the off cut that I can't use So I do the ripping first. Then I come to a planer or a sander in order to clean these up and you can do it your way. You could do this with a good planar. You could do this with a sander. Bottom line is whatever technique you need in order to get those faces nice and flat and true. So that we get good glue joints. Now, what'll happen is we've got different thicknesses of stack. So in my pile, what I did is I separated my pieces by thickness. I started with the thickest ones and then I've got next, next, next. So I'll just keep lowering the head on my sander or planar as I work my way through all of this stuff until it's ready to go to glue up. So back to the sander for me and then it's just rinse and repeat, it's more of the same, making sure. Um Both faces of each piece are in really good shape. This is potentially the really fun part. I love getting to a point with the cutting board where I'm composing the board. I'm putting all these stripes together. I'm getting the look I want. However, we have to do one thing ahead of time. These two pieces are something from the rosewood family. One of the things with some imported woods is that they can have an oil on the surface. And if we don't take a pre emptive strike here that can prevent things from gluing together. The pre emptive strike is really easy. This is denatured alcohol and I'm gonna spritz a little on the rag and then wipe these down. And what that's going to do is get the oil off the surface, allow me to glue these together. And then I'm gonna have the glue bond that I want so that the cutting board will stay together. So if you've got anything that's questionable, if you think it might have oil on it, take the time to wipe it down North American hardwoods. This isn't the thing. It's some imported woods after they're wiped, we can't go instantly to glue up because they're still whoops, they're damp with this denatured alcohol. So give it five minutes or so to dry. Don't give it overnight to dry because then the oil can resurface to the surface and you're right back where you started. So white, couple of minutes to dry as soon as that surface is dry to the touch will be good. You can see on this one, it's wet there, dry there. So just in minutes it's getting to where we want it. Once those are dry from DH alcohol, then we can compose our board. Those are dry, ready to go, so we can roll them into our equation before we compose. Let's talk Galu. So we want for the cutting board something that's got some water resistance to it. Type 12 or type on three would work for this. Type on three has a higher heat resistance than type on two. That being said, the recipient of your cutting board should never put it in a dishwasher or anything like that. What I really like about type on three for this is that it's got longer working time. We have got a lot of strips here. We're gonna put glue on type on two. Like I said, you know, water resistant, waterproof. That's our difference. Um Type on two would work, but I gotta move a lot faster when I use this. So I'm going with type on three and I've got it in a roller bottle that's gonna make it really, really fast to get the glue on so that we don't have to dawdle while we're doing that and have this get away from us. Now composing the board, we have a lot of options. I like when I get to this stage to have more options than I need. So one part of that is the length of these pieces right now is about an inch and a half to two inches more than the final length of the cutting board. That's gonna give me plenty of room to cut the ends. The width of my accumulation here is more than I want for the cutting board. I make it that's good because that lets me substitute pieces in and out for me. This is subjective UBU for me. I don't like to have a real symmetrical or concentric pattern. In other words, I'm not trying to do like wide, wide, narrow, narrow, I, I wanna have more um chaos than that. I wanna have more randomness than that in the board. What I am trying to make happen is cherry Walnut. Then I don't wanna do another walnut because those two boards are the same species. Similarly, I like to when I've got pieces of varying thickness, I like to move those around. So they're not immediately next to each other. There's separation again, that's very subjective. So what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna play with these a little bit and uh we'll see where this ends up so that it looks good to my brain and then we'll be ready to glue up. Cool. That's given me the width I want, I always like to double check cause sometimes my brain makes a mistake here. Double check being making sure I'm contrasting in color strip by strip by strip here because sometimes I, I get moving too fast and I get two cherry side by side. It's nice when you're doing this to do more than one cutting board at a time because it gives you more options. Obviously, if I were doing two cutting boards, I'd have like 2.5 times the wood laying here that I have now. And that gives me more room to wiggle in order to compose the cutting board that I want and put everything together. But I'm happy with that. One thing you want to watch for is I don't like having a thin strip in the end because when I put clamping pressure on this, this is not gonna accept that clamping pressure as well as a thick piece. What I mean by that is when I clamp here and clamp here, it's not distributing the pressure very well because the piece is so thin. When I have a thick piece out there, three quarter is fine, then it's gonna distribute that pressure better. I'm gonna get a better glue up. All right. I think we are G to G now we glue as always uniform film of glue on each piece, we only need to do one edge, one edge or one face all the way down. Now, I like having two clamps from below two clams from on top, keep the ends approximately aligned. They're gonna get cut later. They're gonna get squared off and cut the final length. So they don't have to be perfect. And I'm doing a little bit of pressure and then a little bit of pressure and then a little more. If I kind of sneak up on the pressure, I find that helps prevent the boards from creeping as I'm putting pressure on, moving on me. If you've seen other stuff I've done, you know, I'm not a big fan of wiping glue with a wet rack except for cutting boards. The reason it works here is that after this is all dry, this whole slab is gonna go through a plan or a sander and get cleaned up. So we're gonna, with that machine, take off enough material that the idea of getting glue wet and like smudging it down into the wood doesn't bother me because this whole surface is gonna get surfaced. I'm gonna finish cleaning this up and then watch glue dry. So we can get to the next step, which is when the beauty of what we've put together here is really gonna start to show when we get to the Planer. I love this step when that starts to get cleaned up and you can see the contrasting stripes, the work we did to compose that, it really starts to look great. Now, a couple things here, this planar is a carbide insert, planar. If you still have big glue beads on your board, you need to scrape those off before you come to the Planer, especially if it's a tool, steel knife, planer, glue beads can be really hard on steel knives. Carbide inserts are a little bit more forgiving, but still you don't want to chip your carbide inserts. So if you've got big gobs on there, if you neglected to wipe the glue off like I did, then um, use a scraper to knock those off before you come to the planer. What's gonna happen for me at this point is I'm gonna finish this face, flip it over, clean up the other face. I'm not real concerned about final thickness. I just want the faces clean. So, um whenever they look good, I'm gonna stop whether it's at my inch in accord or not, I can be done wherever the faces look good. So a few more passes and uh the leveling step is gonna be taken care of. I'm looking for two things here. One is, is the board level all the way across. Hence the leveling step. Um Also is all the glue residue gone. So look closely and just make sure you don't have any little gobs that are left on there. We are gonna do sanding on this board still, but it's a lot easier to remove glue residue with a planar than it is with sanding. Now, here's another aspect of this. If you're doing a cutting board larger than the planer you own or if you don't own a Planer, a great way to do this is with a handheld router and just a shot made jig, that'll let you level the slab with a router. Another video covers that how to make the jig, how to use the jig that whole aspect. So it's not included here, just look for that other video, but it's a great alternative, especially with end grain cutting boards, you shouldn't send end grain boards through a planer because they can chip out and it can be very dangerous. So that, um, handheld router jig is a must have for end grain boards and a good thing to know about even for larger edge grain boards for us, this takes care of the leveling step. That's beautiful. And we're all done here at the planer in order to square up these cutting boards, you can do it however you want. But I wanna take this opportunity to show you a pretty cool tip here on your table. So here's what you're potentially up against. We use a miter gauge, we bring this back back, back, back, back, back, back, back, back until we have space to cut this. And at that stage of the game, my miter gauge has fallen off this side of the table saw. So if I try to do this, it's really, really awkward because the miter gauge is all tippy because it's not there. It's back here. So very simple solution do this and this. We don't need to stop block, do this. And then all I'm doing is kind of thinking in the other direction. I'm gonna use my miter gauge like this part of the key to this is when I make this cut, I'm squeezing here to make sure the board doesn't have the opportunity to creep away from the miter gauge face. And it's not, you know, you don't have to gorilla grip it. You just have to be cognizant that you need to hold these together and then I'm gonna do the same thing to the other end because of the travel to get past the blade. I have to move my out feed table a little bit, but this is a great way to cut stuff that's technically wider than your miter gauge capacity. Easy peasy. And someday I'm gonna think of something cool to do with those. I love how they look, but I can't think of anything to do with them following the planar. If you have a drum sander, send the cutting board through the drum sander before we come here. The way I treat drum sander to random orbit sander is the last grid I use on the drum sander is the first grid I use here. Generally, I find if I start at 100 and 20 even coming off of a planar. If I start at 100 and 20 grit, that's in a good spot here. So at this point, it's pretty easy, peasy stuff. I'm gonna sand the surface, but this is gonna happen in multiple steps. I'm gonna do a preliminary sanding starting at 1 20 taking it to 1 50. Then we're gonna do some other stuff and then we're gonna come back and sand some more. So for now gonna fire up my random orbit, get these faces nice and smooth. The goal for sanding is to u use each grit to take out the marks left by the previous operation. So in this case, I'm using 100 and 20 grit paper to take out planar marks and looking down across it like this is a great way with that low glancing light, low glancing look to see if there are any marks left. When we graduate to the next paper, we're using 1 50 to take out 100 and 20 grip marks 1 80 to take out 1 50 grip marks on and on and on and on and on. So looking at this face, it didn't take much that looks good. Flip, same thing to the other face. Then I'm gonna sand it. As I said, I'm gonna go from 1 20 to 1 50 do the same thing. Then we're gonna do some other steps. It's already looking really good. We're not done sanding completely, but we're done for now until we get some other steps down to the board sanded to 1 50. Let's do some other stuff with the edges before we come back and do more sanding. One of the things I like to do is get rid of these sharp corners on the outside of the cutting board. I've said a number of times this is subjective. Ubu. You do what you wanna do for me. I don't wanna have that sharp corner out there so very handy. I keep washers hanging on the wall of the shop. And when I'm doing something like this, I just pick the washer that I think is gonna look. Ok? And dokey. I'm gonna go with that one and that is a great down and dirty template to trace and cut. So there, there from here off to the banda to take those corners off and then from there off to the sander to do a little bit of clean up on those corners. Here we go. When you make cuts like this on a banda with a jigsaw, cut yourself some slack. Stay outside the line. The sander will cover a multitude of sins. Now, clean those up on the sander. I'm not as worried about the line as I am getting a smooth curve and then I'm gonna go ahead and hit this edge, walk into this one. It's just that really, really nice back to our station for another little treatment on that corner. Next thing I wanna do is get rid of this sharp corner. I am gonna do that with a quarter inch round over pretty common for me to use quarter inch round over on both faces of my cutting boards. Now we're ready for more sanding. So here's my thinking on this. I sand it to 1 50. Get the surfaces pretty much where I wanna be before I do the round over. Now, we're gonna jump up to 1 80 on the surfaces and we're gonna sand on these round overs. I really like to use an orbital sander for that with a random orbit sander. I find if I sand those round overs with a random orbit. It tends to leave facets behind if I do them with a good orbital sander, that does a really good job of rounding not faceting. I'm putting it up on these blocks so that I can work the edges as I'm going around. I want this can to lever off the blocks like that. That's the agenda. More of the same. I am gonna work with the orbital and I'm gonna work with the random orbit and get this up to So it's nice and smooth and then we have one more standing thing we have to look at after that. Another thing I really like about these orbital Sanders. I added that flexible pad to this one. So now when I come on that round over, see how it conforms to that shape and that's really nice for making sure again, I want a round over. I don't want facets. I've got this whole thing sanded to 2 20. Now, next step is paper towel, brought a little bit of water to the table and we're gonna wet this thing. So one thing I like about this is it starts to look like the way it's gonna look under finished because of course it's gonna get wet with finish. But what we're doing is raise a little grain, we're raising the grain on this. Yeah, so wet it let it dry both faces. Now, even though you had that sanded silky smooth. When we come back, when that's dry, you're gonna feel just a little like tiny little feathers sticking up. Tell you how to deal with those. Once we get dry here, it's dry. And if I could send like, you know, a fetal agram through the video here, it's just a little bit kind of pebbly. So let's take care of that, which is the whole reason that we raised the grain. The key to this next step is don't get overzealous. So I've got 400 grip paper on the sanding block. And what we wanna do is knock that fuzz back down. It's almost there already done. So if you over sand at this point, basically, you've exposed raw wood. What I did there is I knocked those feathers down. So it's flat again. If I keep going, we're into like new material. And if you wetted it again, you'd raise the grain again, which is what you would have to do. So you wanna do just enough sanding with a fine grit paper to smooth that out. Same thing to the other face. And that's anytime you're raising the grain, that's the rule, just a tiny, tiny bit of sanding. So you can knock that back down and no one to quit next. Very exciting. We're gonna pour, finish on this baby when it comes to finishing. Let's start with what you should not use. Don't use any kind of a vegetable oil or corn oil, those oils can go rancid on your cutting board and they get really gross over time. So there are a lot of choices out there and we wanna have something that's food safe, just like our material, just like the glue that we use. So in my shop, couple things for years, I used mineral oil. The good news with this, it's readily available. Walk into a pharmacy or a grocery store, you can buy it right off the shelf. It soaks in really well, it's not gonna go rancid on you. So it's readily available. It does a good job. It's not quite as durable as the other finishes we're gonna talk about. It doesn't give you quite the build a little bit of gloss. That's nice to have on these total boats. Honey is a little bit new in the marketplace. It works great for this. It's food safe. I really like how it looks, it soaks in really well. It's a very good choice. Pure tongue oil is what I'm gonna use on these boards. Now. The key to this is pure tongue oil. So there's tongue oil and there's pure tongue oil. Wanna make sure you get the right stuff. We've got all of this sourced for you along with the video here when I put this on, I'm basically just gonna saturate the boards. I've got gloves on because I have found more so than a brush or anything. A glove is a really good way to work this in. What you want to do is get it on the surface, let it soak in. Look for dry spots on an edge grain board like this. It's gonna take a couple of coats in order to get to where it's, uh, no longer soaking in on an end grain board. It's gonna take a little bit more. Look at how that curl is popping and that maple right there. Now, right now, there's a puddle of oil here in the middle and I'm gonna leave that because it's gonna soak some more oil in with oils. You don't wanna leave puddles once it gets to where it's soaking in, you don't wanna leave puddles on the surface because that will prevent the oil underneath from drying. So I'll watch that and if it's still ply in a few minutes, I'll wipe the excess off. Now, watch on this end grain board, it's gonna react a little bit differently. React being I think it's way prettier that with an end grain board because we've got end grain coconut. It's like a bunch of soda straws. It's gonna soak in more oil. So you can see already. I probably poured about the same amount on this one as I did the edge grain, but it's really soaking it up a lot more. So you just got to pay a little bit more attention to make sure that you get full saturation and no dry spots Ok. That end grain is ready for another. It's already ready for a little more oil. Yeah. And what's cool with the end grain boards as you get this soaked from the top, we're probably not there yet. But when you flip it, you'll start to see oil seeping through the bottom. Here's where we're at. Watch the boards keep them wet for a bit to make sure they get full saturation if the finish is puddling and it is on this one now, wipe that excess off, don't leave it. Just sit there. Like I said, it'll prevent drying. If you leave a puddle on there, then flip over. Same thing to the other face. A nice thing when you give these away, I always give a little card. I call care and feeding of your cutting board. Tell the end user what they need to do to keep it fresh looking like this. And that's where coming back to the mineral oil can be helpful because you can buy that anywhere. So I'll recommend to people over time refresh the look of your cutting board by just going and getting some mineral oil and putting that on. But like I said, there are a number of products just check and make sure they're food safe. That were great for cutting boards. And that takes you through how to build a cutting board.