I do a fair amount of cooking and almost all the slicing,
dicing and chopping when my wife and I cook in the kitchen. Currently I have a 26” square hard maple face
grain chopping block that is right at 1¼” thick. It has been in constant use for the better
part of 10 years. I treat it with
mineral oil on a regular basis and it is in good shape with a lot of life still
in it. Here is what it looks like after
being oiled up. Not bad but I want to
replace it.
Well, you ask what’s the matter with it and the answer is
really nothing major. So why the
replacement? There are a couple of
reasons. I like the length but it could
be a little narrower to give a bit more space on the far side of the
island. That and I wanted an end grain
block rather than a face grain one. It
is one of those things that fall in the “nice to have” category rather than the
“need to have” and I have the time now to make one.
That said I did not want the typical end grain chopping
block made out of a bunch of maple blocks aligned so the end grain faces up
glued together like a checkerboard. If I
was going to make one, I wanted it to have some character and be a little out
of the ordinary. Staying with the idea
of blocks I decided that rather than square blocks I would use rectangular ones
put together like a brick wall. Going
with the brick wall motif I decided to add thin strips between them that would
represent the mortar in a brick wall. I
wanted the cutting board made out of wood that was not porous like oak, not
soft like pine or poplar. In the end I
decided to use cherry thinking the red color would be reminiscent of bricks and
hard maple for the mortar. I have a fair
amount of 13/16” thick cherry so decided to go with ¾” thick blocks which would
give me 1/16” for milling. Using 1/8”
for the mortar seemed like a good idea so using SketchUp I put together a
drawing of what I have in mind. Here is
the drawing and if I don’t change my mind before I get done it’s going to have
799 pieces. The dimensions are a little small but the length is 25 1/8", the width 21 3/4" and the thickness is 2".
Calculating the amount of material needed to make
this project gave me a surprise in that it’s going to require quite a pile of
wood. Going through my material
inventory gave me this stack. It should be really close unless I
run into some surprises as the cutting gets going. For reference the long pieces are about 8’
long.
Because all of the cherry boards had only one fairly good
edge plus some twist and a little cup, I decided to start out by cutting to
rough length getting rid of splits, cracks, knots and any other defects. With that done I ripped off the bad edge
giving me parallel edges. Next is to
rotate the board 180 degrees and recut the first edge giving me a relatively
square and pretty parallel set of edges to work from. Here you can see how the material broke down. I ended up with good groups of similar sized
pieces plus a handful of odd sized ones.
The three paper tabs are notes to myself showing the estimate of how many finished pieces will be obtained out of each stack.
On the left is a group of odd sized boards marked with chalk
listing what they are planned being cut into. I will
give them a day or so to sit and see if they are stable before going on.
Next is to rip all these rough-cut pieces down to
slightly oversized blanks. I started by
switching out the combination blade normally kept on the table saw to a rip
blade and in this case a thin kerf rip blade.
Below is a photo showing the difference between my combination
blade and a rip blade.
I have two different thicknesses of rip blades, a regular
one and a thin kerf one. Because I was
ripping several blanks out of each of the wide boards, I wanted to minimize the
amount of material turned into sawdust and maybe squeeze another piece out of
the board. Below shows the difference
between regular and thin kerf blades. It's about 1/32" thinner which may not sound like much but over all the pieces being cut it adds up in excess of 2½".
After spending what seemed like forever running boards
through the saw here is my stack of 85 oversized blanks. They are a constant width but the thickness
varies. Cutting the wide boards down in
width helps reduce the measurable cupping and twist in each board. It’s still there but if I cut a board into
six pieces the scope of the problems gets divided by six.
Next is to accomplish three things, remove the cup,
twist and get all of the pieces to a constant thickness. That is done by running them through the
thickness sander. They are short enough
that the sanding drum with remove the twist and cup while bringing them all to
a constant thickness.
With all the pieces the same thickness I headed back to
the table saw to take a skim cut from one side to square it up to the newly
flattened parallel faces and then rip the opposite edge square, just a hair wide
and parallel to the opposite side. With
that done it’s back to the sander for a couple of passes to remove the saw
cutting marks. Here is that process in
progress. 
Last step with these pieces is to sort through all of
them looking for any problems that have shown up while getting them to this
stage. I had cut a few extras and indeed
did have some with internal checks or other problems that got them
rejected. Here is the final stack of
“brick” pieces plus one of the bad ones.
Next up – Ripping the Maple Thin Strips
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