The ultimate guide to making a wooden end-grain cutting board

there are three different types of wooden cutting boards the next time you're at a kitchenware store check them out you'll see dramatic price differences between them the cheapest and most basic would be a face grain cutting board it's just simply a board or maybe a couple of boards joined together to make it a little bit wider the thickness of a face grain cutting board is limited to the thickness of the lumber used to make it a step up is an edge grain cutting board to make this you'll glue the faces of a bunch of boards together and their edges become the cutting surface from a durability standpoint the edge grain is about the same as the face grain board the advantage though is that you can easily make a much thicker cutting board using edge green of course this will require more lumber but the most prized cutting board is the end grain cutting board these are made up of lots of small boards with their faces and edges joined together and using the end grain of the boards as your cutting surface these can sell for several hundred or even several thousand dollars each depending on the size and just like with the edge grain cutting board you can make these as thick as you want one inch to two inch thick boards are common you can even make a freestanding butcher block if you wanted of course these are the most time consuming boards to make and require the most lumber so what's the advantage to end grain cutting boards and why are they so prized among home cooks as well as professional chefs mostly it comes down to durability ingrained boards are really tough i've used this brush demonstration many times in the past and it's really the best way to get the point across so imagine the bristles of this brush are the grain of a board going this way with a face or edge grain cutting board every time you chop on it with a knife you're potentially severing the fibers of the wood and this leads to a scratched or gouged up surface plus cutting this way can dull your knife much quicker but when you're chopping on an end grain board the knife blade will actually slip in between the fibers of the wood the fibers of the wood will just spring back into place without much damage to the cutting board or the knife even with heavy usage an ingrained cutting board will last a lifetime i made this one nine years ago and i use it almost daily i don't even oil it or maintain it the way i should and it still looks great to make an in-grain cutting board you're going to need a hardwood with a tight grain pine boards are just too soft good choices would be maple walnut or cherry i don't recommend oak because although it's a hardwood it has a very open grain for the board in this video i'm going to use walnut and maple you can also use just a single species of wood but if you're going to take the time to make an in-grain cutting board you might as well have some fun with the design you might be surprised when you find out how much wood it actually takes to make an in-grain cutting board and knowing how much you're going to need can be difficult without doing a little bit of math fortunately there's plenty of online resources and software to help you out one of the simplest and easiest i've found is a free site called cutting board designer js there's a link down in the description so when you open up cutting board designer you get a bunch of kind of default settings here so first thing you want to do is figure out what kind of wood you're going to use and just eliminate some of these so in for my board i'm going to use walnut and maple so i can just remove the cherry and the jatoba and the ebony and oops it says i can't remove the ebony that's because they're actually using it in one of these layers here so what i need to do is remove this layer if you look over here on the board it's that black board running down the center that's the ebony so i'll just remove that one so now i can remove the ebony i can remove the purple heart and i've got my two different types of wood i think the best way to approach this is to figure out what you want the final size of your cutting board to be and how thick you want it to be so i know in this case i want my board to be one inch thick so i'll just change this to one inch this is what it's going to look like as an end grain cutting board and this is what it would look like as an edge green board given all these pieces leave the blade kerf as it is that's an eighth of an inch and that just accounts for how much of the wood is going to be lost due to the thickness of the blade so i want to change the source board thickness so the thickness of the boards that i got from the home center are 0.75 three-quarter inch lumber so i can change that so now what i can do is just come down here and just start playing with these numbers to make as complex a pattern as you want in this example i think i'm going to go maple walnut maple walnut maple walnut i think i'm going to eliminate this last layer down here okay so you can see right here is what this cutting board would look like as it's set up here which isn't i don't think is very attractive so what i want to do is i'm going to go with a real simple pattern of just one inch on all of these one inch wide boards i think on this final layer i'm going to make this one two inches so you can see what this looks like it's got kind of a thicker maple border surrounding a checkerboard pattern so i'm going to go up here and look at the final size of the board right now it gives you the two different sizes here's the edge grain board that's this one here it is 20 inches long and the end grain board the length is only 12 and three-quarter inches i want mine to be 18 inches the way to change the length of the cutting board is to change the length of the source board so up here i'm going to just raise this and you'll see the diagrams changing too so i can just click this keep moving this up until this number reaches 18 inches so i'm going to go 0.4 25 27 inches so the 27 inch length boards i'll be able to get an 18 inch long end grain cutting board the width is going to be the same on either the edge grain or the end grain board and right now this is at 10 inches which is perfect so you can change these patterns around and you'll see if i change say this walnut just randomly to a two inch one you'll see how that changes on the final design here so i'll put that back to one inch just to keep this a simple pattern so it's just a matter of playing around with the widths of all of these strips and seeing what it looks like the other important thing to take note of is this number right here so this tells you what size board you need to make these cuts the end grain slices this is once you've made this face grain glue up you're going to slice it into 24 pieces and then this shows you what it looks like if you don't rotate every other layer i don't you know really know why you would want to do that so obviously rotating is kind of what gives it its look so i keep that box checked so it's a pretty simple system just takes a little bit of playing around with and you can use all different types of woods and you can really experiment with the sizes of the strips that you're cutting the first order of business is going to be to cut these boards down to their starting lengths the guide assumes that both of these boards are the same width and i couldn't find a wider maple board so i'm going to have to cut this one into two pieces the final size and thickness of my cutting board requires each of these to be 27 inches long i'm going to cut them at 28 just so i have some wiggle room i picked up these boards from the big orange home center and one thing to keep an eye out for when you're using hardwood lumber is the ends of the boards might have this little indentation there they might be a little bit thinner than the rest of the board that's called snipe and that's from running it through a planer and that last little bit actually gets gouged out a little bit deeper so you want to make sure you cut that part off before you measure out the piece that you need not all boards will have snipe on the ends and if you can't see it you'll be able to detect it just by feeling it next i want to rip strips out of all of these pieces there's going to be nine strips they're all one inch wide except for one two inch wide strip on maple before ripping these i want to double check that my blade is perfectly square with the table that's going to be really important you want to make sure that it's not slightly beveled i just use one of these digital angle finders the first cut i want to make on all these boards is just to shave a little bit off of one edge just to square it up [Music] now i can run that nice square edge up along my rip fence to make these strips [Music] this is my setup for the first glue up i'm gonna have all of these boards just lined up in that pattern so what i've got here is i just have some two by fours that i'm setting pipe clamps on and that's just so that i can elevate them a little bit i've got these boards which are clamping calls these are just the scrap lumber that i put some plastic packing tape on to prevent glue from sticking to it so i've got these ready on the sides and then i've got one ready in the middle this first glue up just makes a face grain cutting board this is a diagram i'm going to follow here which is alternating maple and walnut it's really important that you spread this glue completely over the edges of these boards i'm using titebond 2 wood glue i don't have to worry about these ends lining up perfectly i'm going to cut those all off the idea here is that i want these clamps spaced pretty evenly apart i don't want to take them all the way to the end because i need space room for the for the calls all right so what i want to do here is just to start to tighten these down just a little bit not very much just to kind of hold them in place so now what's happening is that they might not be completely flush on the face so that's what these are for so i can just put one here and then one here then clamp these together i like to put the clamp right over the last board so right about there so what that's going to do is just draw all of these together so that they're flush again i'm not tightening anything down really tight just yet so now it's just a matter of slowly going around and tightening each clamp up a little bit at a time as with any glue up you should see small beads of glue squeezing out between those boards and just to make sure i've got even pressure on both sides i'll put a couple of clamps on the top i like to let this glue dry for about two hours before removing the clamps i give it a little bit longer than i would on other projects it's probably a good idea to loosen the bar clamps before loosening the calls just in case the glue isn't completely dry it won't buckle all right and there you have a face grain cutting board a really long one next thing i want to do is smooth this out so that all of these boards are completely flush to this surface if you have a planer that would be the ideal way to do it hopefully your clamping system worked out pretty good that you don't have too much material to remove i'm just going to use 60 grit sandpaper in my random orbit sander and smooth this out now i can cross cut this into 24 equal width strips this is what's going to determine the thickness of the board and this is why the thicker you want to make your cutting board the longer this piece needs to be so mine's going to be one inch thick so i'll cut all of these one inch wide you could use your miter gauge and a stop block to do this i've got my cross cut sled so i can do the same thing on it also setting up a stop block but first i want to square up that uneven end i'll just clamp this board on one inch from the blade to use as a stop [Music] block you might want to switch to your rip fence to cut these final few strips so that the long side is supported now you can see how this is all going to play out you just want to tip these boards on their edges so that the end grain is facing up and you can see by tipping them all this way that would be one type of pattern you could make but it would be kind of boring so what you can do is just flip every other one like this and that'll give it that checkerboard pattern and the best way i've found to glue these up is just kind of all in one big batch so i'm putting these all back to their face grain facing up here again it's just really critical that the glue is covering every last bit of this surface and this is where you want to have a real close eye for detail make sure all of these corners of the checkerboard meet so okay so it's going to require a bit of cleaning up i've got a lot of dried glue here that i need to sand on by the way if you do have a planer i don't recommend using it for this part planer knives have a reputation of grabbing in grain and ruining your project [Music] i'm using a round over bit in my router to well round over the edges of this board if you don't have a router you can just certainly sand these edges to ease that sharp edge a little bit once you've got your board sanded to a nice smooth surface you're going to need to apply a finish and the only finish i recommend is mineral oil mineral oil is naturally food safe it'll make your board look great and it also helps keep it clean by repelling moisture everything i've read over the years says to avoid using cooking oils such as vegetable oil or olive oil because they can go rancid mineral oil is completely safe to ingest you can find mineral oil in the finishes aisle of a home center or hardware store you can also buy cutting board oil or butcher block oil in the housewares department this stuff is just mineral oil with branding so it's more expensive all you have to do is look at the label and it'll tell you what's in it and this stuff is just mineral oil but honestly the least expensive is baby oil a bottle this size is just a little over three dollars the only thing that makes it baby oil is that they've added kind of a flowery fragrance to it in my experience that scent goes away pretty quickly and in all the years i've been using it on my cutting boards it's never transferred any of that flavor to the food but you know i guess putting food safe on a label of something that's already food safe is enough to raise the price your completely unfinished board is going to absorb a lot of oil just keep saturating the surface filling up all that end grain until it doesn't want to absorb any more i like to apply this with a rag but you can also just use your bare hands it'll make your skin nice and soft at the same time i've also seen people dip the entire cutting board in a bath of oil until it's saturated one final thing about your board you might want to consider adding these anti-skid grippers they're just rubber feet on one side of the cutting board i actually bought these with the intention of installing them on this one but before i drilled those holes i thought i don't really want to do that i've never installed these on a cutting board before and i don't think they're really necessary i like being able to just kind of grab a cutting board and use either side of it but i know a lot of people prefer to have feet on them so either way one thing to keep in mind is that oil is a maintenance finish to keep your board looking new and fresh you're going to want to reapply oil from time to time some people recommend once a week others say once a month while probably most people are probably like me and just reapply it whenever we happen to think about it i think the most important thing to keeping your board fresh and odor free keeping all that onion smell off of it is to wash it off with dish soap after every use and store it on its edge so that it dries completely and whatever you do never put a wooden cutting board into a dishwasher and if you're thinking about selling boards or giving them away as gifts it's a nice idea to include a note explaining its care and finally if your board ever gets to the point where it has just a lot of scratches and you just want it to look nicer and completely rejuvenated just take it back into the shop and give it a fresh sanding hey i really hope you enjoyed this video and found it useful and by the way if you are curious about getting started in woodworking and your you just want a step-by-step approach to learning the basics head on over to theweekndwoodworker.com and check out my course over there that'll have you building your very first project this weekend and while you're over there be sure and download my free guide to getting started in woodworking for under a thousand dollars thanks for watching everybody

Channel: Steve Ramsey - Woodworking for Mere Mortals

Views: 586,130

Keywords: woodworking, woodworking project, how-to, DIY, easy woodworking, steve ramsey, WWMM, Mere Mortals, The Weekend Woodworker, woodworking plans, Free plans, wood, making, building, makers, hobby, weekend projects, Weekend Woodworker, power tools, cutting board, lumber, hardwood

Id: vlP3e5JI_NE

Length: 22min 27sec (1347 seconds)

Published: Fri May 28 2021