OK, it’s the day after Christmas and I finally have the time to write the next tutorial post on how to make an end-grain cutting board.  When last we visited, I said that the next step was to calculate the number of times to rip my two boards to make the strips needed in the first phase of the project.  Let’s tackle that problem now.

When I was first trying to figure out how to make an end-grain (butcher block) board, I looked at completed boards and wondered how I was ever going to glue all those little blocks together.  I knew for sure that gluing a hundred-or-so individual blocks all at once was not going to work because they would be sliding all over the place in the clamps.  I asked around online and learned the secret. The revelation was that the entire process could be carried out using strips of wood rather than gluing individual blocks.

The step we are about to take will create the first incarnation of these strips.

We have two boards 35 inches long and five inches wide.  How many times can these reasonably be ripped into strips?  The first thing you have to know is the width of the kerf made by your saw blade.  Mine is a full-kerf blade, so the width is an eighth of an inch, or .125 inches.  If you have a thin-kerf blade, you’ll need to know its width and express it as a decimal number for this calculation.

Don’t freak out, the math is easy–if it wasn’t, I wouldn’t be able to do it–and if you get it wrong, you simply end up with more waste than you might like.  I ended up with a scrap at the end when I made the board I’m showing here because I like working in simple round numbers.  If you are off by quite a lot, you may have to make another 35-inch board from which to cut additional strips.  Oh well!

Here is how I did the calculations:

Five inches minus two eighth-inch (.125) saw kerfs equals four-and-three-quarters inches. 5 – .25 = 4.75  Two saw kerfs (ripping the board twice) allows for three strips that are each 1.58333 inches wide.  (4.75 / 3 = 1.583333333)  Since I am working with stock that’s one inch thick, this will mean that the strips are rectangular and about half-again as wide as they are thick.

There is absolutely no problem using rectangular sticks, but I wanted my two boards to yield eight total strips rather than six if possible.  My reason was that smaller pieces give the board a more intricate feel and more sticks gives me more flexibility with regard to where the sticks are placed in the final cutting board.

Using wider stock (or more than two 35-inch boards) to start with also increases your flexibility. More stock also increases the maximum size cutting board it’s possible for you to make.

Knowing all this, I determined to see if I could get four sticks from each board.  Let’s do the math: Three eighth-inch saw kerfs add up to 3/8 of an inch or .375 inches.  5 – .375 = 4.625 inches.  4.625 inches divided into 4 sticks yields sticks that are each 1.15625 inches wide.  That is exactly one-and-five-thirty-secondths (1 5/32) inches.  Setting the table saw fence that precisely is a headache, so I decided to make my four strips exactly one inch wide.  An inch and an eighth would have worked just as well and I’d have had less scrap at the end.

The choice to make each strip one inch wide gave me square strips, which I like.  It also resulted in a scrap .46875 inches when I was finished cutting.  (.46875 = .15625 * 3)

One really important note here.  If you do not subtract the saw kerfs out of your calculation first, you will not get accurate results.

Below are two shots of the first rip pass on the table saw.

Below is a shot of how the cut looks as it is completed.

Notice that there is only a little space between the fence and the blade here, and even less between the fence and the splitter.  I used the same basic setup for this as for the cuts I made to square the plank.  A Benchdog feather board and a small push stick.  I couldn’t use my push shoe for this because it is too wide, so I used a simpler stick.  I can, and really should will, make a thin push shoe from quarter-inch hardboard.  That will yield better control.

Here I’d like to mention the great value of the Biesemeyer splitter.  I feel a lot more comfortable using the saw since I sprang for this pricey-but-worth-it device.  This is one safety device that works great and actually gets used because it is so easy to install and remove.  Below are pictures of it.

The splitter and my Forrest Woodworker II full-kerf blade:

The splitter installed:
Note the small round black knob down inside the table.  It’s spring loaded, so you simply pull the knob and lift the splitter out to remove it.  Installing it is even easier because all you have to do is push the splitter into place.

The splitter removed:

Here are the eight sticks that resulted from ripping the two pieces of five-inch stock three times each.

The scrap I mentioned earlier is shown below so you get a sense how that fits in.

This is all the material I have at the moment, but I have taken some time off from work and plan to get into the shop and finish the board this week.

Don’t forget to support me by visiting the advertisers in the sidebars and/or using my vendor links when you shop. I’ll appreciate it greatly. Oh and, leave a comment would ya? I’d love to know whether this is helpful and how I can improve it next time around.