Kitchen Spatula & Chopping Block - #7 Final Glue-up, a Defect & Finishing

The test clamp of the last glue-up looked good as all the joints aligned very well.    Fortunately, the actual gluing also went without a problem and I look forward to NOT doing a lot of sanding.  Here it is, glued and clamped. One interesting thing you can see in the photo is that one side is light and the other is dark.  The halves are not different they just look that way because of the way I ran the pieces through the sander in that the pieces were ran through in opposite directions.  In sanding the end grain the sander pushes the cut cells all one direction which impacts how the light is reflected.  If you look from the other side the light and dark sides are reversed.  I know this effect as “chatoyance”.  The term is from the French word “chatoyer”, which means “to shine like a cat’s eye.”  Here chatoyance is an optical quality in which areas of light and dark looking grain shift and change position depending on the angle of view. The effect is most pronounced in burls and wavy-grained woods like curly maple, where abrupt changes in grain direction cause the concentration of reflected light to change dramatically based on the orientation of the surface wood cells.

Time to sand, yuck.  Not one of my favorite pastimes but it is a necessity to make a good-looking project.  To cut down the time spent, don’t laugh I use two sanders.  In this case one has 220 grit and the other 320 grit. 

Last bit of actual woodworking is to put a nice soft radiused edge on all the hard corners.  The perfect tool for this is a router with a ³/₁₆” roundover bit.  Here is the router, the bit and the finished result.  The sander loaded with 320 grit paper puts a smooth surface on the edge while easing the transition between the flats and the curved edge. 

Now I was all ready to brand my name in and put the mineral finish on, or so I thought.  As I was blowing the sawdust off the surface, I noticed a small defect in one of the pieces of cherry.  It had not shown up while I was making the cherry blocks when I could have culled the piece out – oh no, it waited until everything was glued together and I was stuck with it.  Had it been any normal project I would have just left it and applied a finish chalking it up to one of those things that make cherry what it is.  However, as this is a chopping block, I do not want a pit that can collect food particles.  Here is an enlarged photo of what I saw.  Keep in mind that the maple banding shown is only ¹/₈” wide.

My solution is to remove any loose material within the defect and fill it with epoxy.  The cleanout is done with a hand-held small drill bit.  It’s out of a set of drills used to change the size of orifices in gas fired appliances.  The one shown here is a number 67 drill which is only amount ¼ the size of a ¹/₁₆” drill you get in standard drill bit sets.  It measures just over ¹/₆₄” in diameter at .023”.  Here is what the drill and the defect look like.

Once the loose material is removed, it’s ready to fill it with epoxy but first I had to make a small tool to pack the epoxy in the hole.  This is it, a small brad driven into a scrap piece of wood with the head cut off.  The brad body is then flattened and ground to make the tiny end shown.

A very small amount of 2-part epoxy is mixed up and packed into the hole as shown here and left to cure overnight.

The next day some light sanding with 400 grit paper in the palm sander flattened the epoxy out and cleaned up the patch just fine.

Below is the completed chopping block finally ready to have the mineral oil finish put on.  See if you can spot the patch.  Give up?  It’s 10 rows up from the bottom and 7 blocks in from the right, just in case you are interested.

In preparation for finishing I put down a sheet of plastic and some newspapers because I probably will make a mess.  My lazy-susan finishing stand which makes getting to all the sides easy to get to goes on next, followed by a piece of plastic and finally the chopping block itself.  Pouring on the mineral oil makes a dramatic change as you can see below.

Spreading the mineral oil around, letting it soak in and applying more over a couple of days gives this finished look.  To get to this point well over a pint of oil has been applied.

After letting it set one more day to soak in, I flipped the piece over to the other side and was surprised to find that in some places the mineral oil had soaked completely through the 2" thick slab .  Maybe that explains why the first side soaked up so much. 

Anyway, I spent the next couple days applying mineral oil until the absorption rate dropped off and was comfortable the chopping block was pretty much saturated.  All told it had absorbed over two pints of oil.  From there it was moved and set on some painter’s pyramids to cure for a couple of days.

Typically, I sign my projects using an indelible marker.  However, because of the finish and intended use of this project I decided to burn it in using a branding iron for permanence.  Unfortunately, I forgot to take a photo of it before I started applying the mineral oil so here is what it looks like with the finish applied along with the business end of the branding iron.

Last, is to add some feet to hold it off the kitchen counter.  I used Teflon pads set back from the edge screwed into the bottom side. 

Here is the finished result in the kitchen ready for years of use.

Normally this would be the end of the blog but right after finishing the piece I was cleaning up the shop and came across the rejected cherry and maple components.  Being hard pressed to throw them away I recut the pieces getting rid of all the defects.  Once that was done, I worked with the pieces until I came up with an arrangement for a much smaller decorative piece.  Then in about four days the big chopping block had a little brother. 

Kitchen Spatula & Chopping Block - #6 Milling Sub-Assemblies & More Gluing

With flat surfaces I could use the table saw to square up the edges.  To do that, first the blade in the table saw needs to be changed from a rip blade to a crosscut blade.  The crosscut blade has different tooth geometry and a lot more teeth.

The short ends were in good shape but the long dimension needed a little help.   As the piece was way to long to square using the chop saw, the table saw crosscut fence or my sled I used an 8’ level clamped to the rip fence and a shim to cut one edge square to the ends.  The shim represents the amount the piece is out of square along its entire length.  To make this work the high point and the shim has to be in contact with the straight edge the entire length of the cut.  Because the rip fence is not long enough, I add the level as my true full length reference.  The same process is used to square the thin maple glued panels I did earlier.

Stacking the maple panels and the just completed cherry/maple sub-assemblies up I could get an idea of what the brick pattern really would look like. 

With the sub-assemblies all nice flat and square I can cut them up.  Each of the 5 panels are cut into 5 pieces a little over 2” wide.  This will give me my finished chopping block thickness of nearly 2”.  I decided leave the 8’ level on as an extra-long straight edge.  With everything set I made the cuts and stacked them up until I got ready to start the final assembly process

Now it’s time to cut the maple panels into strips about 2” wide to match the rough thickness of the chopping block.  Because the panels are pretty thin and the grain runs 90 degrees to what you would think they are pretty flimsy so I have to handle them carefully.  I needed to change the temporary fence on the table saw because there is a small gap under both it and the table saw rip fence.  A different temporary fence is needed as I don’t want to run the risk of the thin panel slipping under the fence and messing up my cut.  Last, I set the cut width and start running the panels through making a stack of bed joint parts.  Once cut the pieces don’t have a lot of strength and need to be supported in a couple of places as they could easily snap in half.  Here you can see what I mean about the grain direction in a finished part.

Final assembly of all the pieces can now start.  Here is what the first section looks like in a test clamp.  I decided to do the assembly in stages to keep the number of pieces I had to work with down.

The photo below shows how I have things set up with the one block done and the next series of pieces ready to be added.    On the left are the 2” wide cherry/maple strips and on the right are the thin maple pieces both ready to have the glue applied.  The center is where I will do the assembly and clamping.  The actual process is the same as the initial glue-up of the sub-assemblies.

Ever wonder how I get the photos?  Well here is the setup for the previous image.  To get the right perspective I needed to get far enough back and high enough for the image to make sense.  The solution was to stand the camera and tripod on the workbench.  I need to use a tripod as the exposures are fairly long in order to give me a good depth-of-field, but that’s a whole different topic.

Anyway, to keep the thin pieces corralled while applying glue I needed to clamp them in place.  However, since they are only 1/8” thick using traditional clamps would not work out to well so I used the setup below.  The strips are set on the same piece of plastic wrapped plywood use earlier to glue them up on then held in place with some thin cutoffs that use tapered wedges the apply pressure.

Back to glue-up in progress.  Here is the glued part which represents half of the chopping block cleaned up and clamped waiting to cure overnight.  

The next day I took off the clamps and then did the same two stage glue-up over two days to get the second half done and ready for the next step.  Since both of the halves get glued together, they need to be smooth and the same thickness so its back to the thickness sander to take out any irregularities and get me close to a finished surface.  I start with 36 grit in the sander.  That may seem a little extreme but this is end grain cherry and hard maple which is a pretty tough combination.  Once both pieces are flattened and to the same thickness, I move on to finer sanding grits ending with 150.

This is the last glue-up, only three pieces.  The two halves and the last thin maple strip between them.  Fewer pieces but the joint alignment is more critical.  Before if things were not quite perfect, I could run them through the thickness sander to flatten and true up.  Not this time as the piece is too big to fit through the sander so if I am off, I will need to hand sand the entire high side down to match then flip it over and do it again.  Pretty darn good incentive to get it right in the first place.

Next up – Final Glue-up, a Defect & Finishing