- Hey everyone, my name is
Matt, welcome to my shop. So four years ago, I made a bunch of these larger end grain cutting
boards, and unfortunately, a few of them have cracked. I had made them, and then I
stacked them just like this on the ground over in
the corner of the shop, and a bunch of them have cracks that are kind of emanating
from the outside. I think what just happened there is they were drying out from
the outside going in, and the middle just didn't let
the whole thing come together and it went, pop! And there's some cracks in some of them. So I thought this would
be a fun opportunity to finish these up and
do something a little bit different since I haven't actually made cutting boards in about four years, is to make some chaos boards. So for that, you essentially
take a completed board like this, then you cut it up
at some kind of weird angle, and glue it back together. The more times you do that, the more chaotic the pattern gets. So we'll see what happens, and where it all kind of leads us. Now I am going to miss this extra ballast in the bottom of my workbench,
but I should be able to reclaim that for some
actual usable storage space. So of course, who would
I be to deprive you of all the video of getting
these things to this point, so let's jump back in time a little bit, and a younger me is gonna kick things off. So I just got finished
with a trim project. I made and installed all my own trim, so I have a whole bunch
of offcuts and scraps that I need to find something to do with. So I have the offcuts from
actually making the trim, I have the offcuts from
installing the trim, and I have the original trim
from the room, which is maple. So usually what I'd do
with my offcuts and scraps is I make them all into
cutting boards like these. Now for this project I'm gonna
do cutting boards as well, but this time with all of this stuff, I want to get through it quickly, so I'm gonna make some bigger ones. The ones that I normally
make are 12 by 16. I'm gonna try and make
something more like 16 by 24. And these ones are normally
an inch and five eights thick, but I think I want to
make something thicker like maybe two inches, so
something really big and beefy like some super XL cutting boards. So first step is going
to be to get these things all planned down, and I'm gonna cut them down to a more manageable length, and then start gluing these
things up into blanks. I planned the baseboards, and they got me to about two
inches wide of this flat area at about maybe three
eighths of an inch thick. So I have a pretty good
amount of material here. So my original thought was
to take these pieces here, and rip them into narrower strips so I can glue on, where
are the pieces here, so I can glue on strips like
these that I had from cutting the, or making the moldings
and cutting them to size. But I don't really want to do that. So then I thought I can just
glue all these together, and get a big, like
big blank out of these, and that would work. However, it seems to be a little boring because it's gonna be a bunch
of maple strips together. So what I'm gonna do is, I
pulled a few extra boards. I have some boards that
got cut kind of weird by the sawmill, so
these are a little thin. I also have a few pieces
of flooring from my flooring project that I
can get rid of as well. So I'm gonna start planing these down, and I'll mix these into the strips here. So these will be planed down, and then cut to about two inches wide to be sandwiched between
all these pieces of trim. And then I'll have one
big blank, I can run that and flatten it all at one
go, and then I can plane away all of the rest of the profile
on top of the moldings. So this blank, I didn't have
enough pieces long enough to make up a full 16 inch wide blank. So what I did is glue up
about nine inches wide worth of stock here, so then
I could take some of these things, which are much thinner,
I have these thinner strips. So what I could do with
these is stack 'em together, and then I'll glue both of
these two stacks together, and then glue this whole thing to here, and then I have one for the other side, and that'll give me my
full 16 inch wide width. (hammers clamps) (boards thump on each other) So now that I have my blanks all glued up, they can be flattened
and planed to thickness to get rid of all that excess material. These blanks are all gonna
be wider than my jointer, so I'll use the hangover method to flatten all of these boards. So that consists of
making one wide rabbet. On the jointer, it's gonna establish a nice flat reference area, and then a platform can be added to the planer for the rabbet to rattle on. Your rabbeted area will
reference off of that platform, going through the planer
nice and smoothly, and that will create a flat
surface on the top side. Once I have that top side flattened out, I can turn the blank over and remove that excess bit of material next to the rabbet, and you'll have a nice wide,
flat blank ready to go. What's funny is that even though
I have a 12" wide jointer, I actually end up using
this method quite a bit. It works pretty easily, and
if you're not flattening things constantly, it's not that big of a hassle to go through this. Now once everything is
cleaned up through the planer, I'll give all the blanks a light sanding. That's gonna remove any
little like fuzzies, or in my case back then, I had
straight knives in my planer, and if I had any planer
tracks, I would remove those and make sure that when
these blanks get cut up and glued together, there'd be
nothing interfering with the glue surface coming together,
ensuring a nice, tight seam. Now with all that prep work done, it's time to finally cut these things up into the individual
pieces that will become, I guess the cutting boards. So I'll square off one
end at the crosscut sled, and I can set a stop block for the thickness of the
final board that I want, and then I can go crazy and
just start cross cutting all of these little blanks
down into the individual parts, which will be glued up
into the cutting boards. (saw buzzes) And after a ton of
crosscutting, that'll leave me with a whole stack of all these
different blanks that I can then mix and match together
to make the final boards. Since I'm going for a more random pattern, I'll grab pieces from
all the different blanks, mix them together, and
then there'd be essentially no discernible pattern, because there's nothing
repeating in the cutting board. So once I've decided on the final layout, I can apply glue to all that stuff, and get them all glued together. Then I'll repeat that process until I've glued up all
of my individual blanks. (Scraper scraping) For flattening all this end
grain, I like to use the router. It goes pretty quickly, it
can take a pretty big bite if you need to so you can do the entire flattening in
one pass, essentially. And then from there I'll run
it through the drum sander a few times to clean up
any of the router marks, and get a head start on the sanding. And then at this point, I
decided that since I went through all this work to get to
this point where all these needed were some finish sanding and some edge profiling
and the hand holds, I would just set them aside and, you know, never finish them. So let's jump back to the future. Is that, yeah, let's do that. So I'm gonna start these
off with the tracks, I'll put some kind of weird
angle, arbitrary angle on here, and then I can take these over to the table saw and rip
them into new strips. And what I'll do here
is basically use this as an opportunity to
remove the cracked area. So on this one there's a
crack that starts right here, then it comes out to here and
comes back out to the outside. So if I put the track on
something like this-ish, and then make that cut, that'll
eliminate the cracked area that we waste, and I can get started on the new angle for that cut. So I'm gonna work through all the boards, make a randomly angled cut on all of them, and then we'll head over to the table saw, make some new strips, which
I will probably make at somewhat of a random width, and then we can mix and match, and oh boy, glue all of
these boards back together. (wood thumps) (saw buzzes) And actually before I head
over to the bench with these, I'm just gonna run them through
the drum sander real quick to clean up both faces, that
way I remove any saw marks or inconsistencies in the pieces
that are due to the table saw. Easily, the greatest
consideration with the end grain cutting boards is just the consistency, and tightness in the glue seams. And in order to achieve that, you really have to have very
accurate, consistent parts. Because any error you have
in your parts can compound over every single strip
you add to that glue-up. So taking care of any potential issues that could cause any of
those things to be messed up will make the end result
quite a lot nicer. So you can probably see the
chaos pattern starting to form, and it'll be a lot crazier as
I start mixing and matching different blanks together,
which we'll do in just a second. So I had two boards down here that I'm not gonna be cutting up. So I have this big one down
here that did not crack, so I'm just gonna take it through the entire finishing
process as a standard board. And I have this guy here, which
was actually flattened and became too thin, so it's a lot
thinner than the other ones. So I'm just gonna kick that one out, and maybe I'll finish that into something. But, so yeah now I'm just gonna go and do some more glue-ups again. I'll go ahead and just mix and
match things from my stacks, and find some kind of crazy patterns that look halfway decent. And it's just gonna be the
same thing as the last step. We're gonna get some glue
on here, get some cauls, get some clamps, get these
things glued back together again, and then we'll see if we want
to cut these things apart once again to make an
even more chaotic pattern, which I'm leaning
towards no at this point. (chuckles) depends how many times you want to go through the same exact process. (chuckles) (board thuds) (clamp rattles) (board thuds) So I know I was just
gonna do one iteration of the chaos pattern, but
I tend to get pulled in and sucked into these things. I think I'm gonna do one more
because it's just not quite to the chaotic pattern that I really want. I can see the lines too much,
so I think what I'll do is I'm gonna go through the
entire process again, I'm gonna make the angled
cut on the long edge, and then go ahead and rip these things back up into individual strips. While at the table saw,
I can use it to trim up all of the unevenness from
my original cutting boards being different thicknesses, and run them through
the drum sander again, clean up the faces, and mix 'em all up, and
glue 'em back together. And hopefully, the chaos will be enough. We'll see. (chuckles) (clamp thuds) So these are lookin' pretty good. I think I'm gonna call
it good at this point, because I don't really want
to iterate through that again, and I think this is chaotic enough. So at this point, it is time
for the most important step, waiting. So I will let these things sit out here for five to seven days, and
allow them to reacclimate and to warp or do
whatever they're gonna do if they're gonna do anything. So next week I'll come back out here, and I'll flatten them real quick, give them a quick sanding
through the drum sander, give them an actual sanding,
do the edge profiling, add the hand holds, and then
it will be time for finish. Now this waiting thing is one
of the more important things that I learned over the
years of making these things, because you essentially, at this point, you've taken a bunch of boards, turned them inside out,
stood them up on end, so you've really shuffled up the moisture content of that board, and it's really gonna
be all over the place. Especially if you were starting
with wood in a transitional season, where the outside
is gonna have a different moisture content than the
inside, which we just exposed. The other big thing about this is that at this point, we
have dumped a ton of glue into this thing, and that brings
with it a lot of moisture. So allowing these things
to acclimate for a bit, release all the extra
moisture from the glue, and equalize a little bit, will allow them to warp now when it
actually is easy to fix, versus later after
they're already flattened. This style of board that
I make, the reversible two-sided board, needs to stay very stable because if it does warp
once it's finished, it'll be very noticeable because it won't sit flat on a counter anymore. If you're doing a one-sided board with some feet or something on it, if your board warps, if it cups or bows, it's not gonna be a huge deal. If it twists, you'll notice
it, but if it cups or bows, it won't be a huge deal. Two-sided boards are gonna
be much more sensitive to any amount of movement. And these end grain boards
are enough work to flatten, it's not fun to have to do it twice. (motor buzzing) (sander humming) (sand paper rasping) Finally time for finish. I think, if you don't do
these for a long time, you kind of forget how much work it is just to get to this point. It is a ton of work. So I have my finish here, and
I'm just gonna flood that on and allow it to soak in as
much as it's gonna want to. Basically, I'll look on the underside and when I start seeing finish
coming through on that side, I'll flip it over and finish things up. (instrumental music) So I let these sit over night, so they are dry to the touch now. And I'm gonna come through and apply a very light second coat. That second coat is going
to sort of even out the look a little bit, since we have
a lot of different pieces of wood, which may absorb
finish at different rates, this will just kind of even things out and make it look a lot more uniform. The trick here with this
finish is not to create a film, so I'm not gonna really
leave any on the surface. I'll just wet the surface a little bit, let it sit for a few minutes, and then wipe off any excess so there isn't anything
sitting on the surface curing. And lastly, I'll just give
everything a light sanding with some 1000 grit sandpaper, that's gonna smooth everything out, make 'em really nice to the touch. This is a tactile thing,
people touch these things, and having them be nice and smooth is a pretty critical part
in the final product. So I am really happy with the
way these things turned out. The random chaotic pattern
is definitely unique, and very trippy as you're staring at it looking at all these
weird shapes and things coming together into one single board. It does make your head
hurt just a little bit. Every year I donate
something to the Twin Cities Habitat for Humanity's silent auction, and this year the chaos
boards went through those. So these were auctioned
off, and they raised $1,300 for the Twin Cities Habitat for Humanity, so that is super exciting. I am thrilled about that. So lastly, one of the sort
of side effects of this chaos board, which I didn't
really comprehend til I did it, was the amount of waste, the
amount of like, compaction. So remember, from the beginning, these three boards started from five boards just like this one. So five boards like this, well I guess, here. Five boards like that,
three boards like that. So it's, there's a lot of waste. But luckily enough, in my next video, we'll take these scraps that
I generated from these boards, and make some more cutting boards because why not perpetuate the cycle? (chuckles) So make sure you check out my other video, I'm making scrap cutting boards
from boards that were scrap, and were made from scraps. So we're really iterating down that path. So thank you as always for watching, I greatly appreciate it. If you have any questions or comments on the cutting boards or
anything here in my shop, please feel free to leave me a comment. As always, I'll be happy to answer any questions you might have. And til next time, happy woodworking.
