Kitchen Spatula & Chopping Block - #1 The Beginning

This blog entry series is going to cover two projects, replacing a tattered, split wood handle on a small spatula or condiment spreader which is a short project.  However, the second one is a little more involved which is making a brick pattern end grain chopping block out of cherry and hard maple.

The spatula is one of a pair that we have had forever whose handle had separated from the blade and was cracked.  Not the best scenario for cleanliness.  Here is what it looked like before I started.

First step was to find the right piece of wood to make the new handle.  A piece like this only requires a small piece of wood which opens the possibility of using an exotic wood.  Going through what I had on hand I came across the following candidates:

·         Red oak - it has too open a grain for this purpose.

·         White oak – grain is not as open but not quite the color I wanted.

·         Cherry – one of my favorite woods but I wanted something a little denser and harder.

·         Hard, curly and birds eye maple – all are too light in color, I am afraid of them getting stained.

·         Walnut – here again I wanted something a little denser and harder.

·         Wenge – good and hard but at least for me it seems prone to splintering.

·         Katalox – hard, dense, dark almost black in color.  Great as an accent but not much character as a single piece.

·         Leopardwood – hard, great flecking like quarter sawn oak, but those flecks can be problematic as they can flake or split off when working.

·         Texas ebony – hard, dense dark almost black wood.  My piece has a greenish tinge and has not much grain or real interest.

·         Ebony – like Texas ebony it is a hard, dense black wood with no real figure.  The piece I have almost looks like a piece of black plastic.

·         Purpleheart – when cut it looks purple but after a while it can turn brown.

·         Cocobolo – nice hard, dense slightly oily material.  I like working with it and the grain looks great, this was a top contender.

·         Mesquite – hard, dense, stable very rot resistant wood with a nice warm color and good-looking grain.  This is the wood I decided to use.

With the material selected I sorted through my store of small pieces set aside from when I made a pair of mallets in an earlier blog entry.

Here is the piece I decided on using, it has a nice interesting grain and color.

With the new handle material selected I began by removing the old handle.  The two halves were held on by a couple of brass rivets.  They were easily removed by drilling them out.  Here you can see the setup on the drill press ready to go.

I started by cutting a very small notch on one side of the blank for the stainless-steel blade to fit in.  You could cut a notch half the thickness in each of the two handle halves but the blade is only about 1/32” thick so I decided to just cut a notch that thick on one side.  I used a router to make the cut for a couple of reasons.  First, because with the router lift in the router table very, very tiny adjustments can be made to the cut depth.  Second, by using a router bit I end up with an absolutely flat bottom in the notch which means the blade will set flat in the notch with no gaps.  Here you can see the setup and while it is almost invisible the cut has been made and I am ready to go on to the next step.  The miter fence with the plywood keeps the cut square with the blank so the center of the blade is in line with the center of the blade.

Next is to rip the blank in half on the table saw to give me my two halves of the handle.  This photo shows the blade set in the notch on one half with the top half next to it.  Note that the faces that will get glued together are what were the top and notched bottom of the blank.  The recently cut faces will make up the exposed top and bottom of the handle.  If I had wanted to make the grain match up better I would have cut the piece in half before making the notch and reassembled the pieces along the cut.

I beveled the end of the handle that will be next to the blade at 45 degrees using the disk sander and a fence adjusted to give me the right angle.  The little inset photo on the right is a close-up o f the sanding disk and the end of the handle.

Rather than reattach the new handles with rivets I chose to epoxy them in place.  It was fairly simple in that I mixed up some black 2-part epoxy, applied it to one side of the handle, set the blade in place, laid down a piece of 6 mil polyethylene film then clamped it all together.  Last thing before setting it aside to cure was to make sure the blade was square and in line with the handle.

The next day I unclamped the assembly and peeled the plastic film off.  Since the epoxy does not bond with the polyethylene it acts very well as a barrier to the clamps.  As you can see in the photo below the blade is well embedded in the epoxy.  Since the holes in the blade are filled in, I think it will be thoroughly locked in place.

Next up – Gluing, Shaping & Finishing