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.
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