Turning Free Scraps into a $325 Cutting Board

a few months ago a Furniture builder in Toronto gave me a ton of these Walnut scraps three buckets yeah all right you're gonna take that work with it put your car around the bath check out all of this Walnut this is insane I used 116 of these pieces to make a coffee table I tried to sell it but I was in kind of a rush and it was a very unique piece so I ended up keeping it for myself it's now in our living room and I still have for a 12 24 28 32 36 40 42 of these pieces left they've been sitting around just waiting for the right project and then a few days ago I was cleaning up in here moving around the scraps and I remembered some comments I got on the coffee table video a lot of people love the look of the underside of the table where all of the end grain is visible and I thought to myself I probably have enough pieces here to make an End grain cutting board so I did some math and found out that I have exactly enough pieces to make a really big end grain cutting board if I lose one piece I'm gonna have to make the board substantially smaller because I'll lose an entire row or column so I'm gonna have to be very careful throughout this entire project first things first we gotta trim every single one of these pieces into a square let's do it [Music] foreign so once this is trimmed it'll only be about 11 and a half inches wide so I think I'm going to take one of the ends off to add some width so that is about 20 inches long 13 inches wide that feels like a really nice size so each one of these has one two three four five one two three four five okay easy so we just gotta make glue ups that are five pieces long foreign about the horizontal bands in that last time lapse I had my camera set to the wrong frame rate [Music] believe it or not I had exactly enough long clamps for this glue up boom oh so if we were to glue up these pieces just like this we would end up with a pretty bad cutting board because there's a ton of gaps in between all these pieces when we glued the segments together these edges did not form a flat face so I'm going to use my jointing jig to flatten these faces on the table saw this is a super easy thing to set up I'll link the tutorial in the description let's get to it foreign [Music] so I clearly didn't let the glue cure for long enough because three of these Stacks broke along the glue joint as I was pushing it through the jointing jig it probably doesn't help that it's not exactly warm in here even though it is a relatively mild winter day and I have the propane heater going but I glued these back together brought them into the warm house for a full like two and a half hours so hopefully they're strong enough to make it through the jointing jig [Music] there we go oh no oh my gosh I just dropped that one luckily the glue joint survived let that be a lesson to you don't rush it's never worth it oh look at those tight joints we did lose a bit of length the board is now 17 and a half inches long since we took about an eighth of an inch or maybe a little less off of each side of each strip but this is gonna be so nice foreign [Music] this time I'm not taking any chances on the glue up I'm bringing this thing in the warm house to cure boom there we go so the next step is to flatten this thing and as you might have noticed this is a little too big to go through my planer but I have a cheat code a router sled and if you're not familiar a router sled allows you to flatten huge pieces of lumber this particular router sled is made by Clean Cut woodworking it's a four foot by eight foot version so technically I could flatten something the entire span of this table for now I only need to take advantage of this tiny portion of the router slides capacity but when I was shopping for one I was thinking you know what one day I might want to make a giant table so might as well just buy the biggest one he makes I've only tested this out this is my first time actually using the router sled I'm so excited about this tool this has the potential to be an absolute Game Changer you'll see why to secure this to the table I'm just going to use a few dabs of hot glue and as per usual when I'm using a new tool for the first time I'm gonna start on the bottom [Music] so I have a big carbide tipped flattening bit in this router which should make quick clean work of The Cutting Board all right I got my router set just over the surface of the board PPE on let's do this [Music] there we go one perfectly flat side and very smooth too now you can see the reason why I put the glue on the sides so that we can scrape it off that is some strong hot glue use my blow torch to soften the glue a little bit that I should be able to oh I think I need to use a little less hot glue on the other side come on how is this still attached oh whoops good thing we're going to cut that off anyway nope uh I was afraid this would happen you know I wonder maybe if I just like [Music] ah there we go all right this side I'm only putting hot glue on the edges all right side number two let's do it [Music] I really need to get dust collection set up this is ridiculous foreign [Music] there we go so on this one I did a finishing pass in this direction which pretty much got rid of the lines you can see the difference between this side where my last pass was this way and this side where it feels like it's already sanded up to like 100 grit so that router side work drastically cut down on the amount of sanding that we're gonna have to do foreign [Music] so these edges did not turn out very nice I don't know if you can see it but they are not Square I probably need to invest in a track saw but in the meantime I'm going to clean these up on the table saw let's do it [Music] [Applause] there we go much better you know what time it is I'm [Music] at carbide bit and the router sled definitely paid off because it only took 15 minutes to sand this thing up to 220 grit look at that that is looking so good next step is really going to add a level of refinement to this board I'm going to add a quarter inch round over to all of the edges let's do it [Music] foreign all right just a few more finishing touches before this thing is ready to sell next step I want to add my branding to the back of the board [Music] here we go nice uniform pressure flat [Music] there we go a little bit of excess burning but that should fade away with some sanding so wetting the wood here is going to do double duty of getting the sawdust out of our burning and raising the grain this causes the wood fibers on the surface of the wood to swell when that dries we can sand off the swollen fibers and that will give us a super smooth finish thank you oh this is gonna look so good so I gave the board a final sanding with 220 grit and we are finally ready for finish this is a two to one mineral oil beeswax blend that I made myself it took me about 15 minutes to make 921 grams of this so after we apply the finish I'll weigh the container and we'll figure out how much we used now I'll use my blowtorch to liquefy the beeswax this will even out the finish and help it soak into the wood so this has been sitting for about an hour and now I can go ahead and wipe off the excess and buff this to a shine [Music] all right final step is to add on some non-skid feet can locate those with my corner jig [Music] boom there we go [Applause] [Music] so The Cutting Board is done and now it is time to actually sell this thing I took some nice photos and made four sale posts on Instagram and YouTube community that whole process took 50 minutes bringing our running total to four hours and 55 minutes of course I still have to package and ship this thing and based on my last cutting board project I'm estimating that'll take around 30 minutes that brings our total time spent on this project to 5 hours and 25 minutes to figure out our sale price I'm going to use the hourly rate on my last cutting board project as a guide that was 56 dollars an hour if I remember correctly but we also need to subtract our material costs so the Walnut obviously was free we probably used around five dollars in glue the cutting board feet were four dollars and then the wood finish if you remember it took 15 minutes to make 921 grams of my DIY wood butter we used 21 grams to finish the cutting board the material cost to make 21 grams of wood butter is 63 cents and the time cost 15 minutes times 58 an hour times 21 grams divided by 921 grams 33 cents it cost under a dollar in Finnish moral of the story it is very worth it to make large batches of finish yourself you save so much money so that brings our total material cost to an even ten dollars and if we apply that hourly rate of 58 that gives us a sale price of 325 Canadian or 240 U.S you know that's an expensive cutting board but considering how fast the last one sold I'm feeling pretty confident that this one's gonna sell too you only need one buyer so the posts are live and now we wait [Music] so I'm going to be honest I was spoiled by the sale of my last cutting board project when I did that project I made the for sale post at 5 pm and I woke up the next morning to three people who wanted to buy the board for this one I also made the post at around 5 PM went to bed and I woke up to no offers of people wanting to buy the board now this is kind of to be expected it is more expensive more expensive things tend to take longer to sell I've learned that the hard way but you know still if something works out really well you have high expectations so I come to terms that this board probably won't sell within a day like the last one did but then a couple hours later I get a DM from someone who seems very interested in the board they end up never getting back to me a couple more hours passed another person texts me seems very interested in the board but again once I respond they never respond back a few more hours pass and I get a text from Ross in Singapore who is committed to buying the board we go back and forth he's okay for paying for shipping boom deal is done packed up the board dropped it off the post office and it is headed halfway across the world Ross your board is on the way the power of social media to connect with people all over the world and do business with them is amazing I am so grateful [Music] I am so grateful if you're curious about the 1000 CD project and other stuff that's going on in the background you can gain exclusive access to the behind the scenes Instagram page by supporting this channel on patreon I want to give a special thank you to my top supporter on patreon my mom Kathy Kurt thanks Mom I love you thank you so much for watching and I will see you in the next video [Music]

Channel: Morley Kert

Views: 448,979

Keywords: make, maker, making, do it yourself, design, morely, kurt, morly, morelykert, morleykert, reclaimed, furniture, money, profit, sell, sold, selling, facebook, marketplace, how, to, beginner, amateur, fun, hardwood, expensive, garbage, trash, find, found, dollars, profitable, saw, garage, reuse, reused, cutting, chopping, board, charcutere, shipping, business, hourly, rate, party, entertaining, scrap, wood, scrapwood, scraps, free, walnut, end, grain, endgrain, router, sled, economics, price, breakdown, cost, costs, charcuterie, serving

Id: HA_qCCgTHJg

Length: 16min 15sec (975 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 07 2023