Ron's friend Emily Benson stopped by the workshop hoping that Ron could help her with a problem she was having in her kitchen. One of Emily's favorite pastimes has always been cooking, but her cutting and chopping board was just not up to her high kitchen standards.
Click Here For a list of what
you will need in order to complete this project.
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Emily wanted a board that was really solid and wouldn't wiggle and bounce around when she did a lot of chopping. She also wanted a board that would not warp. And finally, she was hoping Ron could make it easier for her to scrape the chopped food into the bowls without making such a mess. Ron felt confident that he could meet Emily's challenge by designing and building a cutting board that would meet her discriminating specifications.
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1. Cut wood
- Ron and Emily began the project by cutting three 17-inch long maple boards.
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- They would glue these three boards together to form a singlewide board.
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- But before gluing the boards, Ron said it was important to alternate the grain on each piece. This would minimize future warping of the board. When Ron showed the end of the board, Emily could see that the grains ran in arcs that he alternated upward, downward and then upward again.
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2. Glue boards together
- They applied wood glue to the edges of the boards…
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- …and then clamped the three boards firmly together while the glue dried.
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3. Sand the surfaces
- Ron wanted to be certain they spent enough time carefully sanding the board. They began with a belt sander and first ran it across the board at a diagonal to the grain to flatten each board relative to the next one. After they had given a good sanding in that direction they switched to sanding back and forth along the grain.
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- Once Emily got used to the power of the belt sander, she used it to smooth out the surfaces.
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- Next, Emily switched to a random orbital sander and took a few more passes over the wood using progressively finer grades of sandpaper.
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- By using finer sandpapers, they were able to get rid of all the marks the sander left behind. They ended up with a surface that felt almost like glass.
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4. Trim ends
- They took the board over to the table saw to trim the ragged ends.
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- Ron placed the cutting board in the table saw cradle. The cradle was basically a piece of wood that slides on top of the table.
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- He showed Emily how to grip the cradle and the cutting board firmly at the same time, pulling the cutting board back so that it pushed firmly against the rail of the cradle.
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- They slid the cradle forward, passing the cutting board's edge through the blade thus creating a smooth and clean, straight edge. The board now looked like it had been cut from one solid piece of wood.
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5. Cutout
- Ron's next challenge was to make it easy for Emily to get the food off of the cutting board and into the bowl.
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