Making a Batch of Charcuterie Boards from Firewood

hey everyone my name is Matt welcome to my shop so about a year ago I made a few of these little like serving charcuterie tray things from some scraps from the sawmill and since we're coming up to Christmas here I figured I would make a few more so the majority of last year's trays were elm this year's trays have a majority of walnut as well as some other species like birch ash and I do have one elm board here as well so before we get started why I say a big thank you to case-knives for sponsoring this video as part of their keeping your hand sharp campaign I'll tell you more about case as well as their campaign later on in this video let's start making all of these so I get started I went out and raided the firewood pile these are some pieces like cut up from the offcuts from turning a log which is cylindrical into something rectangular one of the things that do like about this project is it allows me to kind of go through the stack and be a little nostalgic about the logs that these things came from so one of the piles was getting towards the bottom and I found a bunch of these walnut pieces these are from the very first chain saw milling video that I ever did so that means that these things have been sitting out on the firewood rack for about four years now and you can see at this stage they don't really look like much so the last time that I made these I made a video about the overall process that video more focused on the overall prototyping process I didn't really have an idea what was making going into it and the video is focused more on finding the design and just having some fun in the shop I'm going to switch things up this year and focus more on the batching side of things so for this video I'll be recording the full sequence of the entire process so I'll be able to see exactly how long each step takes and be able to share it with you so in every shot I'll have the clock in place we'd be able to see how long everything is actually taking and this video was actually inspired by an email that I got from a viewer after I posted the original video he was asking how long it took to make an individual tray and I didn't really have a good answer for him I guess maybe 15 to 20 minutes but when I'm recording my videos are more focused on making the videos and that's so much how long the actual woodworking process takes so I don't really know how accurate that estimate was but we're gonna find out for sure so this first milling process is going to remove a lot of the waste material from these boards they're all different sizes thicknesses and shapes and since they're just sitting in a firewood rack but not gonna be very flat so I want to remove as much of the waste as I need to at this step because they're also too wet to actually use for projects right now checking the pieces of firewood with my moisture meter does give me a reading of around 50 percent to 20 percent for some of the newer stuff so the stuff is just too wet right now to use so removing as much butter right now is going to allow this thing to dry a little bit faster and once I have them all milled up I can stack them in the shop and allow dry for a few weeks so these have been sitting stacked in the shop for a few weeks and when I brought them in here they were reading about 16% or so and now they're reading about 7.5 to 8 percent or so so that means things are ready to go and then go through the whole milling process once again and one thing I did do is last night I came through and I did some epoxy fills in some places just to kind of clean things up a little bit so those taken care of so we can mill them all down and not to worry about any more epoxy so I had another 20 minutes of the board and we will get back to this same exact process all over again the only difference this time is all we're doing now is just bring these things back into flat as they've dried they distort a little bit as you'd expect I just want to bring them back to being flat again some of the boards weren't toya all cleaned up as well so some of them still have some rough sawn marks on them so at this point we'll run through the entire milling process once again and take everything down to final thickness now if you wanted to you could play this all down to one standard thickness for me I like a little variety so I'm just going to play them down to whatever thickness they end up being so technically it'll all be different thicknesses so the next type is going to be to cut these down to final length is trim the ends get rid of any dirt and checking things like that and what I like to do it this step is just kind of keep the goofy angle that might be already on the ends for when I cut some the firewood that way things don't look so perfect so I'm necessarily going to put this thing up into the fence and make that cut I'll it whatever way it needs to go stabilize it and then feed it through so I keep some kind of odd angle on the end I think that just gives a little more of an interesting visual look so it's the time I start firing these through this step next we can add the little under bevel here on the edges that's gonna make it easier to pick this thing up off the table and to do that I have the tall axillary fence on the table saw I'm a blade tip so let's think me round vertically over the blade I just use the one that I made last year to set the blade back up so it's tilted at 20 degrees and it's about 3/8 of an inch away from the fence so I can bring this stuff back over again and cut all of my little finger bevel thingies on all of the boards so really that's about it for construction and from this point forward is all finished prep and then finishing so the engines need to be prepped as well as the faces I'm going to go through and do all of the finish prep on the faces first and then I'll start to address all the edges of course so next I want to address these edges and some of them have the bark still attached to them and depending on how well attached the bark is I may leave some of the bark on there I know like for this for instance this bark is gonna just fall off this is the same stuff I used to make my son's beds so full of walnut at least strip away the outer bark and leave the inner bark which leaves a pretty cool pattern and I really like it so I'll use a draw knife this triple way to mature away the bark and I'll blend it in back with a sander now that the sexy hand tool interlude is over it's back to finish prep so I'm gonna take these things to their final sanding grid of 180 and then I'll break the edges and soften things up by hand with some 180 grit sandpaper this is a really tactful step so I'm using my hands to feel for any kind of imperfections sharp edges things like that and this is probably where a lot of times are gonna go in the making of these boards so where kids are staying with our in-laws this week so Lindsey and I just went out for a little date my belly is all full of carbonara so I'm gonna go through and finish all these up so I just cleaned off all the boards with some compressed air and now it's time for the last detail before finish go ahead and sign all of these boards I'm pretty sure the most things I've signed in one sitting besides the time I closed on my house so there we go I got all the boards laid out and now it is time for finish which is pretty super exciting there's a lot of boards on here I'm really excited to see the color and figure popping them there is a lot of interesting color and character for firewood so for the finish on these limbs getting give them one heavy coat of salad bowl finish and that should be plenty for these things [Music] [Music] so now last step these things is going to be to apply a little bit of wax I'm using this wax I got from the guys with SoCal woodshop again same stuff that I used last year and this wax is gonna do two things first of all it's gonna even out the fish a little bit you can also achieve that by adding a second thin coat of finish on top of the first one just to even things out because the wood might absorb things that a little bit of a different rate and add in a second color help to kind of even that out now the things that are gonna do is I since I'm buffing it out by hand it's gonna remove any dust nibs and just kind of smooth out the finish and make these boards feel super smooth you can also achieve this by adding a second coat of finish letting it cure for a few days and then giving it a really light sanding with some high grit sandpaper but since this is one of those Christmases in a couple of days I think this is exten wax is gonna be the best solution to get this things done in time and done that's a nice stack of boards so I'm getting ready to prep all the stuff for the glamour shots and about a month ago case did send me one of their pocket knives and I guess I could slice this super SATA with a pocketknife but today I'm feeling kind of fancy so I thought we'd use the culinary knives to slice this stuff up so nowadays it seems we only use our hands when we're trying to create the perfect Instagram post but case is challenging us to keep our hand sharp and create something using more than just our two thumbs so with that in mind this year I got here and made all these serving boards for Christmas gifts now all my friends will have the most elegant food and cheese and meat and sushi plates ever so I'm really happy with the way he's turned out and it's really cool to think that these are just some piece of firewood not too long ago and that was a lot of fun to be out here using my hands and making things it's just that's always fun it's nice to be off the computer and kind of batching things out without worrying too much about the video but speaking of that let's talk numbers so I'll put the time breakups breakups breakdowns up here on screen for you but it looks like it took me a little over six hours to make all of these and I ended up with 22 serving boards and some of the longer ones here at for the longer ones so eighteen of the normal I guess single ones and then for his long ones slap breaks down to a toll time per unit of sixty minutes and 38 seconds I think that's pretty darn good this is definitely a really great project to use this from scrap so if you do happen to have a sawmill like I do I know you have more of these off cuts then you know what to do with and this is a great way to use up some of those maybe generates some extra little gifts or some extra revenue if you want to sell them to you know at your store at the craft fair or something if you don't have these yourself and you might know song with a sawmill you could probably take a whole bunch of these little off cut things off their hands because they're probably up to their ears of them and they can't get rid of them fast enough at best you get a whole stack for free at worst you'll pay firewood prices and that'll probably feel pretty much like free anyway and I guess the last option is to just buy a narrow slab and slice it up into your individual pieces and do it that way that is definitely a way of doing project if you so choose do so so I should be restocked on gift items for a while big thank you again to case-knives for sponsoring this video if you want to check out any of the knives that I showed in the video I'll leave your link down in the description below or you can check them out at case-knives com so thank you as always for watching I greatly appreciate it if you've any questions or comments on the serving platters anything here in my shop or anything at all please feel free leave me a comment zones to be happier any questions you might have and until next time happy working

Channel: Matthew Cremona

Views: 170,702

Rating: 4.9449501 out of 5

Keywords: woodworking, woodshop, furniture making, matt cremona, matthew cremona, fine woodworking, period furniture

Id: spUdwMB6SJk

Length: 14min 40sec (880 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 23 2018