Cutting Board Tutorial – Stage I

Before we get into the actual work involved, let me say a little more about equipment.

Although the table saw is central to making cutting boards there are other useful tools.  It’s possible to make a cutting board with only a circular saw and a router, but you’ll have a harder time getting good glue joints since you’ll be making less accurate cuts.  As I mentioned in the first post in this series, the first cutting board I made was cut with a direct-drive benchtop saw.  Direct drive saws are nothing more than a motor and blade attached to a table.  They are in essence just a circular saw that’s mounted to a fixed plate.

To get decent glue joints in those days I set up my router to act as a jointer.  To do this, it’s best to have some form of router table.  The one I own is from Porter-Cable and cost me around $125.00 when I bought it.  They are a little more costly now, but still a real bargain.  Under my table is a classic in the world of routers, the Porter-Cable 690. This model has been upgraded and is now called the 690LR.  I inserted a 2-inch straight bit and adjusted the two halves of the split fence to work like a jointer.  If you are interested, I can post more details about how that is done.  Just let me know in the comments.  As a side note, I prefer half-inch shanks on my router bits and never buy quarter-inch shanks.  The half-inch version is more stable, and thus more accurate.  I buy only carbide bits for similar reasons.  They cut better, burn less, and last much longer.

In any event, I now have a jointer and a surface planer.  I’m glad for these tools because they improve my efficiency and accuracy a great deal.  In my shop I have a Ridgid six-inch jointer and a Ridgid 13-inch surface planer.  I got mine at Home Depot and they carry essentially the same models now.  If I had it to do over, I’d get the newer DeWalt planer and a Delta eight-inch jointer–or maybe one with a nice spiral head from Grizzly.

I also have a Porter-Cable compound miter (chop) saw, which I used to square the ends of the plank for this project.

Later in the project I’ll mention the sanding options, more details about the router table setup, and so on.

OK, let’s get started.

I began with a rough cherry plank.  The first thing I did was plane it.  If you are making furniture you can’t be this sloppy, but what I did was simply run it through the planer until both sides were clean and smooth.  For furniture you need the plank to be flat and square.  For our use, it can have some twist and bow.  This is true because we’ll be cutting the plank into very small sticks, and because we are not constrained to any specific finished dimensions.

Once I had the faces smooth I took the plank to the jointer and cleaned up the edges.  It was here that I encountered a significant problem.  My board was bowed along its length by nearly a quarter inch.  This made accurate jointing tedious and error prone.  Though it would have eased this problem, I did not want to cut the plank in half at this stage.  This is just a personal thing.  There is no real reason why you should not cut the plank in half.  I didn’t because I was not yet sure how many sections I would make; two or three.  Advance planning would have resolved that question, but I walked out to the shop and began the process immediately.  I did it this way in part so that you could see my thought process.  The other part of the reason is that I dislike planning as a rule

I jointed for a while and finally got fed up with the shortness of my jointer table and since I had the board fairly close to straight, I put it on the table saw and cleaned up one edge and then used that against the fence to clean up the other.  What I got was a surfaced plank five inches wide and one inch thick.  Here is how I set up the rips.

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The plank had waney edges on both ends.

Above is the less waney of the two ends.  The image below shows the end with the worst wane.

Processing the less-waney end was easy.  I simply cut it off using the chop saw.  I didn’t want to do that on the other end because the waney area was quite long.  I did cut off enough (about 3 inches) to remove some planer snipe however.  This gave me a plank five by one and, at 71 inches, just short of six feet long.  Next I cut the plank into two pieces 35 inches long.

At this point I had to figure out how many times to rip these to make my strips.  I have to run now, but I’ll pick up here in the next post.

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