Make an End Grain Cutting Board

Which one do you like better? Doesn't matter too much. I'm gonna show you how to make both styles of end grain cutting boards. End grain cutting boards are great because they last a long time and they look crazy. Cool, similar but different approaches on these boards no matter what we start with a slab. So the first step of an end grain cutting board is making an edge grain cutting board. When we get to what you saw here with a big chunk of walnut, little bit different treatment. Talk about that when we get there where I'm at with this one, glue is dry cutting board is leveled. We're ready for the next step, which is more cutting. First thing I need to do is square and end and once that's set, then we can start talking and creating cutting board. You only need to square one N. This is now going to go against the fence, need my outfit table back when you set your fence, we're gonna do this. This number turns into the thickness of the cutting board because the cut that we're gonna make here gets rotated 90 degrees to stand on end and become an end grain cutting board. I wanna end up in an inch and a quarter. I'm gonna go over that to an engine 5 16 blade selection. We're cross cutting. So I've got a crosscut blade in there that is a 60 tooth, cross cut blade, same blade I would use if I want a good quality cut, cross cutting, any hardwood or using my miter soft for cross cutting. Now, just to show you what this is all about. We started with this, we made our cuts. Now we have this, which is what turns that into an end grain cutting board. Once we glue all these together. Composing and angering cutting board is pretty darn simple. What I usually do is put it in the clamps the way the slab originally was step one, rotate everything up 90 degrees, step two, flip every other one, step three, make sure I didn't screw that up. So it's easy, you know, if you get a little bit distracted in the middle of this to end up like flipping two that were adjacent to each other or something. So, looking at the pattern, it's pretty easy to tell that my pattern is correct. The other thing that can be interesting here is if you make two or three angering cutting boards at one time and their widths are similar, you can interchange parts. So um that's a cool look when I do uh when I put an angering cutting board together back at the edge grain board stage of this. One of the things I'm trying to not do is create a lot of symmetry. Like I don't want a checker board when I'm done. That's me. Maybe you want that in your board. But I'm pretty intentionally getting this to come out random with a random look to it rather than a um real uniform checkerboard type. Look. The other thing I've got here are these blocks, big picture. What's gonna happen is glue a little bit of clamp pressure, a call and a call so I can do clamp pressure this way, that's gonna keep the edges align, that's really critical. If you're trying to maintain a critical pattern in the board. In other words, if you're trying to really, really, really make sure certain lines hit, then using these calls on the outside to guarantee that is important. So this is a standard cutting board step. Now, tight bond three glue and a roller bottle and roll the faces. Now, don't get over zealous with this pressure or the calls won't be able to do their thing. Similarly, don't get overzealous with the call pressure or these clamps won't be able to do their thing. What makes these calls work and not end up part of the uh ingrain cutting board is there's packing tape on the face that's up against the board and that's what's preventing the glue from sticking to the calls. All right. Close these boy. That looks nice. Ok. Mhm. My last step with this, I'm gonna grab a bucket of water and a rag and wipe the glue off the top and bottom surfaces to clean those beads off. And we'll let that glue dry. The glue is still drying on our end grain cutting board. But as luck would have it, I have another end grain cutting board where the glue is already dry. When it comes to leveling end grain cutting boards, you really don't want to put these through a planar because it's end grain sticking up. It's relatively easy for a planar to grab pieces on here and fling them back out. It's very, very dangerous. It's something that it doesn't go wrong every time. But when it does go wrong, it's really, really, really bad. So a great way to level an end grain board and really any slab is to use a shot made leveling jig like I have here takes advantage of a handheld router that has a large diameter router bit in it. And we have got another video that covers building this and the setup take off about a 32nd to 1/16 of an inch per pass. That's gonna be affected by the horsepower of your router, the diameter of your cutter. But what we wanna do is simply move across the surface here and level it out. It's gonna get rid of those glue beads and it's gonna get this dead flat. Yeah, that went great. And really with one pass, the board is pretty level. A sander is gonna take care of the rest, the glue beads are gone. So the leveling jig is a great way to give you a nice true surface there. Knock that glue down so that everything is dead flat. This is another style of ingrain cutting board. This big chunk of walnut has a different look to it than the other board. Look at the way the grain mirrors and mirrors and mirrors and mirrors all the way down. So our approach to this is very similar to what we've already done, but also different just like it. But different to do a board like this start with a single slab. This is a piece of elm. It's got a lovely crotch coming up through it. This is basically our edge grain cutting board already made one big slab. What's gonna happen is we're gonna set up ours so that we take our cuts off the end, this end grain is what's gonna become our end grain cutting board and look already. There are some beautiful patterns in that end grain. They're gonna end up just like on that walnut up against each other. Mirroring, mirroring when we put this all together. So one of the things I do wanna do with this is Mark. I wanna, I wanna keep track on this. One of which pieces which so I'm gonna put a big face mark on here. That way when we get to the gluing set up, I know how this is gonna go back together. Dimensioning is a little bit more critical with this. We want to end up with an even number of pieces. When I measure this, it's just a tiny bit over 16 inches long. So I wanna work in, numbers are gonna give me even number of cuts. So two inches would work. And again, the number I set between the blade and the fence results in the thickness of the final slab. So I can go two inches here. That'll be a two inch thick cutting board and eight cuts. Now, when you do this, it's a little bit different because this board is really close to If I put two inches saws unplugged between the blade and the fence, the curve is gonna take away material and I'm gonna end up short when I get to the last cut. So instead I'm measuring two inches to the left side of the saw blade, not in between, but to my left that way, I'm building the curve of the blade into the cut. So I know I'm gonna get eight cuts and then this part is just like what we have already done. OK. How's that for minimal waste? That's the, the beauty of that technique of measuring to the left side of the sublight. That's what it gives you from here, back to the gluing table and we'll get this put together, taking advantage of the sequence that we created, by the way, this was cut when you bring the slab over to the clamp area. First thing to do is put it back together, taking advantage of your marks because now when we do our rotate, we really wanna pay attention to getting parts paired up. So what we wanna do, we want the faces of that seem to be together when we flip. So if I do this and this see what we get like a book match. So then if I do this and this and then thus and this need a little more space and then this and this. So your double check on this one is mirror mirror, mirror, mirror, mirror, mirror, mirror mirror. And that is crazy cool. This when it is cleaned up after this step is gonna be amazing. So now we're back to gluing. I just can't get over this elm. It is gonna be absolutely beautiful. You know, it's gonna give us a little bit of a preview is wiping that glue off of the water and seeing that grain wet. Yep, that's gonna be amazing. So end grain cutting boards, you now have two different methods at your disposal. They both work great. They both have their advantages. And again, an advantage to an end grain board is it's gonna hold up under your knives better and especially something like that. Nobody can argue about how beautiful they are.