How to Make an End Grain Cutting Board with Tom McLaughlin, Part 1

[Music] hey this is Tom welcome to the shop this is the time of year it's mid December when you push aside the furniture making part of work and you got to make a few gifts so I have discovered one of the best gifts that gives you the most bang for your buck and that is making an end grain cutting board here's the end grain cutting board I'm going to show you how to make right now and what I love about this is not a lot of investment of time and energy and really not that much material so you can even use scraps from your shop but the wow factor for that amount of time and the substantial feel of a gift boy someone is going to be very happy with you come Christmas this year so I want to show you how to get started with the material right from the rough stage I'm using cherry on this board some other good woods to use are like hard maple I've seen some people use walnut it's a little pricier it's also an open grain wood so I would stay away from the open grain woods like especially oak or ash something that's really porous this is a tighter grain wood and cherries not the hardest wood but on the end grain it is plenty hard for a cutting board and I like the color you get it turns into a dark well kind of a medium brown gold reddish and over time it'll deepen in color and look really beautiful for many years to come so to make this project you just need some six quarter material I'm using kind of a wide plank and I'm gonna cut this up into long strips approximately two and 1/8 wide rough them out from this plank I'm going to need nine of those and then I'm gonna have one that's about an inch and a quarter or so at the end so I'll show you what that's for in a minute so you need nine like this and I'm roughing them to length is 20 inches long so I like six quarter because of the thickness you get it doesn't take as many blocks to make the whole width of the board in fact it just takes nine to get 12 and a half 12 and 3/4 and we're going to dress this down to give us the maximum thickness we can but let's say we get back to our solid piece first thing I have to do is rip this into strips now this is a rough sawn piece of wood it's not flattened yet so what I want to do to maximize the yield and thickness is I want to rip these into the narrower strips before I flatten them that way I'll end up with a greater yield of thickness if I tried to fly there's wide board right now I don't know if you can see that but it's got a nice curve to it so I would flatten this side and then by the time I got the other side true to it my boards would be much thinner so the first thing we'll do is rip these apart now here's an important tip you never want to use a table saw with wood like this that's kind of curved or warped that's the most dangerous thing really that can happen on a table saw other than sticking your hand in the blade of course but what would happen is because it's wobbly the board will be fed into the table saw blade and that piece can quite easily get by combined between the blade and the fence and if it binds and you lose control of it that peaceful rock it back at about 200 miles an hour which can do some serious damage so that's called kickback so whenever you're using a table saw you always want to have the material nice and flat so how are we gonna rip this well we're gonna use a band saw a band saw cuts downward it's really the safest saw in the shop pretty much so that what I've already done is he's joined in one edge and we're gonna take this over the bandsaw and I want to get warm more strips out of this and then my inch-and-a-quarter at the end so here we go let's head over the bandsaw [Music] all right so now I've got all my parts roughed out to rough dimension and you can see I've got nine of the two by 22 and 1/8 by 20 and I have this one narrow one that I'm going to use for my narrow strip now one thing to do is it's nice if you can get all your pieces from the same plank at least I like that look that way you get a more harmonious color in your finished board if you like a little contrast and your material isn't fully heartwood you can leave some of the SAP in which which looks like a little whiter point you know so in this board know if you can pick this up but this is getting close to the SAP these little corners here and on this edge you can see this wider swath is SAP wood I'm trying to avoid it completely on this board that we're going to make right now so that we just don't have any of that look but we'll get a nice random looking pattern of end grain all right so once I've got my pieces roughed out like this the next step is I have to flatten one face of these rough pieces I want to true that up and get a good and flat and true on the jointer so I'm going to pass all mine pieces over the jointer and then we'll run them through the thickness planer with the jointed flatten side down on the table and the thickness plane and we'll take off just enough until these are both surfaces of parallel now I want to try to take the minimal amount off so that I get the thickest yield and we get the widest board and then once we're done getting both sides parallel we're going to work on the edges and get ready for glueing them up all right so let's head over to the jointer and the planer and we'll get these all trued up all right we're here at the jointer which will flatten one surface of this wood now one little tip when using the jointer to get the most yield out of the board is if the board has a bow in it like it's curved from end to end like this we want to put the bow side down you don't you'd want the crown side being up okay so this piece is pretty straight but there's a very slight bow in the bottom the reason we do that is because when we come to the jointer and you set it down on the table you can see the ends are both on the table but if you turn it upside down you'll get more of a rocking motion and if you happen to be bearing down too much on one end you're going to take a lot more passes until you get it all cleared up at this end and then by the time you you plane the other side you'll be quite a bit thinner than you wanted so by putting the bowed side down you'll be just at first taking off both ends and then you'll get a nice clean pass more quickly with taking off the least amount of material so here we go let's get our safety equipment and we'll get started [Music] [Music] [Music] okay we've got one face all jointed true and flat and now this face will ride on the table on this thickness planer and it's going to be cutting a parallel cut off the top so I want to set this so I'm just taking a fairly light cut I'll run them all through and once I see if I still have some to clean off one I'll just run them all through till they're good but we should end up pretty close to an inch and a half because we've taken just a very light cut off of the jointer all right so let's get started [Music] [Music] [Music] all right we've got all our pieces dressed on both sides two surfaces parallel and flat to each other and now I'm going to measure and Wow I've got a full inch and a half so that's really good out of six quarter stock sixth quarter means an inch and a half rough so that's a term that uses the sawmill it's usually sawn about an inch and 5/8 thick so to be able to dress that down and get an inch and a half is about as most you'll ever get now what I want to do is join one edge here now I'm gonna go up on edge against the fence and skim and true now a third edge then we'll go to the table saw and I'm going to rip them at just over two inches so here we go I'm gonna true one edge and then we'll rip at the table saw [Music] [Music] okay we're here at the table saw I've got that one edge nice and square jointed true so now I'm going to index that edge on the fence now I have a truly flat square piece of material so this is when it's much safer to use the table saw so what I'm going to do it's just rip these pieces just almost two and a sixteenth and that'll give us enough material to joint off both edges and we'll end up with approximately out two inch wide pieces all right here we go [Music] all right I've ripped nine pieces my 10th I want that narrower piece that inch and a quarter so I'm gonna reset the fence and this is the piece that has a bit of SAP on it so we'll be ripping that off and we'll have a pure heart wood cutting board here weak [Music] alright back at the bench I've got the nine pieces and my one one and a quarter and now's where we start to get a little creative with it I like a random look of the end grain if you can see this end grain this this piece has the green running diagonally or rift as they would say this one's horizontal in plain or plain sawn with the surface here here's a none of the diagonal none of this so what I'm going to do is just mix and match them so that everything is kind of random going across but I don't have to matched up right next to each other so I'm gonna flip this one I don't like that so I'll go in for end that's good now I have this coming up straight across we're diving down we're going up that's looking good so we've got kind of a an uneven rolling grain on the ends here and once I get that all set up what I want to do is true the ends this will be my true end on this end so I want to get that approximately square I've got over length so it's not super critical but just want to make my guideline here with it approximately square that's good okay so now this will be my direction that I want to glue them up in so what I'm going to do is make giant kind of v-shape that way I could get these mixed up and I can get them back in order now I'm going to make one straight line over here this will help me to align them properly during glue up without worrying about the ends I'm just going to have that line fit when I'm gluing them up now we have we have one edge on most of these that's that's sawn and one engine is jointed but these are not ready to glue up yet the joints look pretty good but we want to run them through the jointer one time so that we get a good accurate fit and we want it to be flat now one of the things that you want to do is when you glue this up you want it to stay flat and one of the keys to doing that is the way you joint them so if you put orientation arrow kind of like this and think of yourself as feeding all these pieces through the joiner in the same direction so I'm gonna join this edge going through then I'll turn it and I'll go in this direction again so what happens is the piece next to it will go through with the face against the fence and then this piece will go through with the bottom against fence when they come together if there's any error in your fence it will be canceled out on the joint and you'll end up with a perfect joint that will give you a true flat surface now all that depends on how on how well you've set up the jointer so you really have to make sure your joiner is tuned up and knives are sharp the outfeed table is in perfect plane with the apex of your knives and you'll get a beautiful cut with no snipe at the end so I'm going to take these back over the jointer will joint these edges one more time going all through the same direction and then we'll be ready to glue them up let's go [Music] [Music] all right we're back at the bench getting ready for glue up I've got all my strips in on the clamps so I got it kind of set up the clamps or the right space apart and I've got these additional call blocks which are going to prevent me from denting the material too much and they help spread the pressure out on wider pieces like this it's not as big a deal but my particular clamps these are jorgensen bar clamps and they're very strong you really want to go to some stronger clamps to do this because you're clamping up really nine seams so mine on the on the bottom of these clamps they're angled strongly so I actually saw that angle into my brace clamp so what that does is it it keeps this this call from turning up like that so I've cancelled out that angle so I've got a good flat pressure on there but I've got them all oriented in here with my V back here and now what I want to do is get them get some glue going so what I'm going to do is turn everything up on its edge like this I want to glue this edge this edge all the way across I don't need to glue that edge because this glue will be pressed against it so I'll take these all together in order and set them down right here a little flatter surface and then we'll move them back into calls so what I'm gonna do is get the glue I'm using type on three it's waterproof which is nice because you're probably gonna be exposed to some water with these boards over time the trick is putting on enough not too much oh it's easy to put a little more on than it is to take it off so putting a good bead down twice now well took at the beat on there I want to smear it out rather than using my finger I'm gonna use a little roller now if you were in production making several of these on one Saturday or weekend it'd be a good idea to have a small glue roller like a three or four inch paint roller you can use like 1/4 3/8 inch nap you can wrap it in plastic after and it will last quite a while you just pour the glue right into a rolling tray and you'll just get it out and you'll just be rolling it right on it'll save you some time just want to make sure I've got a good healthy coating on there it's this coating is gonna get pressed into the other face make sure we have a good just good coverage no bare spots and I'm just kind of even it out all right so I'm gonna just start with this end turn it down and back to my first piece what I like to do is give it a little bit of a rub fit and I'm seeing the glue squeeze out all the way on and I'll set it writes that guideline is in line get the next piece and repeat it this rub fit distributes the glue really well on the other piece almost feel it suction in [Music] just continue on all the way across all 10 pieces [Music] [Music] now one of the things I tried to do while I was laying these out was if I had any bad ends like here I've got a chip out I tried to put them all to the same end because I know after I saw the next stage I'm gonna be left with about an inch almost almost an inch of waste on one end so I could put my defects down there if you have material that has knots in it or defects on the face like this you can put those all to one side and that can just be the bottom of the board that action that actually won't happen till we do though our next cut that you'll see okay we've got all that glue nicely rub fit in all our scenes are good and that line is pretty close to being straight on I just want to bring my clamps up it's nuts okay now it's good to have a rubber mallet or something I want to make sure is that these boards are getting are flat on this rail these i-beam rails are pretty true so if it maintains flatness there I know I've got a true flat cut on this piece okay so I'm just gonna gently snug [Music] at the end there those seams all feel pretty nice so it's not get a bit more good that's just a slightly up at the end there that's good now I'll go to the other end now I can feel if I'm flush well pretty close to flush here I'll go ahead and snug this one and I can see that's thing very nice and flat and see on the surface here you're getting good squeezed out along every joint that's a good sign that we've got good pressure and adequate amount of glue so snug those up now for insurance I'm gonna throw one more over the top this clamp let's see I've got this little angle block to cancel out that angle and I just want to get some good pressure here I know it's gonna be staying pretty flat and that's it that's a nice clue up so you can see all that good glue up all these joints are nice and tight and on the bottom we see a nice bead of glue all the way across that's what you want if you get too much it's okay you'll just have more to clean off so I'm gonna set this aside and what we're going to do is move to the next phase stick my glue roller back in the water so it doesn't harden up on there and sort of like Julia Child I'm gonna get my next one out of the oven so here it is this is what that plank will look like after it comes out of the clamps again I've got my my nine two inch wide pieces all the way across and then my inch and a quarter at the end I've got some glue on that surface and you can see the beads squeezing out here and the black it's just where it's touching the rail a little bit but I say this down it looks pretty flat that's good the first thing I want to do is get off that excess glue I'm gonna put it into the bench dogs here hold it tight just use a good old paint scraper and get that glue off [Music] [Music] all right that feels pretty good now flip [Music] [Music] and we're ready to get this oh this is where it starts getting physical and you start to get a little exercise with the project but that's only going to increase because what we need to do is true up the surface and flatten it and then flatten that so if you were in production you'd want to have a drum sander a wide belt sander something like that that you could just send this through and get that nicely sanded on one side flip it over and you could say on the other side but I'm assuming most people don't have a sander so I'm going to show you the good old-fashioned way and that is by hand planing so we're gonna skim plane this surface until we get it good and flat and then we're going to flip and do the same on the other side I will show you my drum sander but only after I show you this method alright so I've got that nice and true now I you've got to have a plane that's well tuned this point is in good shape it's recently been sharpened up helps to wax the sole a little bit too I've got a video of tuning up a hand plane you can check that out if you're going to dive into this alright so I'm going to it helps to go diagonally to true you now if your plane is tuned up you're not pushing that hard so you either have to take a lighter shaving you're really fighting it a lighter shaving and sure it's sharp and a little wax on the sole everything will go better all right I'm still a little low here so I'm gonna go across again [Music] [Music] alright that's feeling pretty good I feel a little bit of a edge digging [Music] one more time just lightly little diagonal [Music] all right that feels nice nice and smooth so I could check that with a straightedge pretty flat [Music] really good so close enough for what we're gonna do even if it was slightly out okay now just for I just want to touch this up I feel anything hi actually it all feels so good I don't even need to card scrape but these are gonna be sawn now into strips then turned up on edge that's what makes our end grain glue board I mean a cutting board so before I do that I want to just lightly sand it by sanding this hand playing surface it makes the glue have more hair kind of to grab into a hand playing surface is just almost polished because the fibers are sheared off okay when ice and I double up on the ends so that I don't end up going light on them if I just went straight up and back my sanding would be concentrated in here so that's just a little habit that helps you sand evenly now I'm gonna flip and as if we haven't had enough exercise already I've got to hit the side all right so again I'm gonna go diagonally and then we'll smooth it out the surface same thing again [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] all right that's it two hand playing surfaces dead flat so if you don't have a sanding a drum sander or a wide belt sander that's pretty much what you have to do I suppose you could try it with just a handheld belt sander but that can be tricky and you're not really getting the leveling the truing that you gain from a hand plane I was using a number five older Stanley model which has a good cooling effect to it what I'm gonna do next I'm going to square one end and then start taking my cuts I'm gonna use the sled at the table saw to make a good truing square cut there so let's go back to the table saw and we'll get ready for our next step all right now we're back to the machines we're going to crosscut right here on this glue top plank and I've got my little index line I'm going to slide it over until I hit the curb cut and there I'm all set my safety gear on and here we go [Music] now you can really see the layers coming to the surface ear on a nice random layout pattern and we've got a Trude flat square edge so what I want to do now with this edge is turn it and that edge we just saw Shawn is going to be indexing off of the fence now to put in my regular fence bring it up now I want to remove this insert it's a little over cut here to reduce the amount of tear out when I'm cross cutting here I've made this zero clearance insert it's just a fresh insert and I raise the blade very slowly so it cut up and there's very little gap around the saw blade so that the fibers on the crosscut will be supported and will resist blowing out to carrying out as they say so cut this in here I've also got that that little green splitter back there that all adds an a measure of safety so that the piece won't drift back and bind but it'll keep true and sawn straight okay so now I want to set my fence here's where you're deciding how thick your cutting board is gonna be now I've seen them a good end grain cutting board you don't want to be any less than an inch and a half I like to make them between an inch and three quarters and two inches thick it starts to feel a little more like a butcher block table but it's on your countertop so you feel a lot more secure with it and it's gonna last for generations if it's well cared for so I'm gonna bring it up I'm gonna go just below two let's say one in 1516 that'll give us a board that will finish out close to one in seven eight all right make sure I play tight enough good you're on and now what I'm gonna do is make nine cross cuts so I'll get my nine pieces which will be turned up on edge and that's going to create our end grain cutting board so let's go [Music] [Music] [Music] all right let's go back to the bench we go we are getting close we're going to start seeing the end grain cutting board emerge right now [Music]

Channel: Epic Woodworking

Views: 182,368

Keywords: Tom McLaughlin, Epic Woodworking, apprentice, apprenticeship, woodworking apprentice, woodworking classes, woodworking school, furniture making, woodworking classes nh, How to Make an End Grain Cutting Board, cutting board, how to make a cutting board, woodworking tips, woodworking techniques, woodworking projects, woodworking, end grain cutting board, woodworking tools, master classes, making a cutting board, making an end grain cutting board, woodworking how to, food safe

Id: _x3OGwc3CiE

Length: 42min 44sec (2564 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 06 2017