Cutting Board Tutorial - Stage III

At the end of Stage II we had all the sticks cut.  Now it’s time to do the first construction on our board.

I’ve noticed that a lot of people ask about what glue to use on cutting boards, so I want to address that here.  When I began thinking about making an end-grain cutting board, I read that one should use polyurethane glue.  Frankly, I couldn’t imagine using that foamy stuff for this.  Fortunately you don’t have to.  Cutting boards are not made to be submerged in water.  In fact that’s a fast way to kill one.  With all that end-grain exposed they are veritable sponges and they absorb water at an amazing rate unless they are very well maintained–and who really maintains their boards meticulously?

It is not necessary to use a waterproof glue.  I use Titebond II yellow wood glue.  Titebond II is a water resistant aliphatic resin glue.  I think that’s a good thing since cutting boards do get washed from time to time.  This type of glue also gives you significant working time, which you’ll be glad for by the end of this part of the process.

Here are the eight sticks again.

It’s important at this point that you not be distracted by the edge grain, no matter how interesting it may look.  We are only interested in how the end grain looks.

Turn each of the sticks until the end grain is oriented in a pleasing way.  You can flip some of them end for end if that makes a nicer pattern on the end grain.  In addition to turning them and flipping them, you can reorder them.  I did that with this set of sticks so that I could capitalize on the color difference between sapwood and heartwood.  In cherry, like most darker woods, the sapwood is much lighter in color.  This can make for interesting patterns running through the resulting board as you’ll see later.

Here is how the end grain looked before I reorganized my sticks.  The picture below shows the way they look after I’ve arranged them in the order I prefer.

Note the “V”-shape created by placing the two pieces with prominent sapwood adjacent to one another.

Also of some interest is the fact that the other end of my sticks does not look very interesting at all.  See the picture below:

You may well have noticed that my 1×1 sticks actually aren’t perfectly 1×1.  They are a little rectangular, so when I rotated them some are slightly higher than others.  That’s OK because we’ll be planing this flat, and that brings up another point.  It will make your life easier if you make boards small enough in one dimension that they can be run through your thickness planer.  For most of us that means no more than 13 inches.

It isn’t absolutely necessary to have a thickness planer for this project, but if you don’t you’ll find that you’ll need a goodly supply of patience.  My first boards were leveled with a sander.  Trust me, it’s a lot of work.  If you must level with a sander, a belt sander is much more efficient than a random-orbit sander.  Hand planes can also be used, of course.

I’ve read some people who say that the sticks in end-grain cutting boards must all have the same grain direction so that all the swelling and shrinking happens in the same direction.  Failing to do this, they say, will cause the board to break apart over time.  That has not been my experience.  The smaller the ends of your sticks, the less you have to worry about the movement of each one, and I orient the grain as I like it.  So far that has worked very well.  Al Ladd does the same thing, by the way.

Now that you have your sticks oriented as you like, you are almost ready to glue them together.  To ensure a strong glue joint we need to be sure that there are no gaps along the sticks that will be next to one another.  Put your sticks on the bench as shown above and look along the joint lines.  If there is any significant gap between any two sticks, you’ll need to joint them to ensure you get a good solid joint.  Dry fit the sticks together as shown here and you’ll have a good idea where you stand.

There are lots of ways to joint the sticks, but the easiest of them is to use a jointer or a router table.  I show below how the setup looks for jointing a stick on a jointer.  It is beyond the scope of this tutorial to delve into jointer technique.  There are many articles and books around that cover that much better than I can.  Here is the image:

To joint with a router table (as I did early on) you’ll need a good straight bit.  The longer your straight bit, the thicker stock you can joint.  Here’s what I’ve used:

I only use half-inch shanks and I only use carbide bits.  Half-inch shanks reduce vibration significantly and that improves cut quality.  Carbide is just the best deal in cutting tools because it stays sharp so much longer than high-speed steel.

To set the router table up for use as a jointer, you’ll need a split fence so that the fence on each side of the bit can be set differently.  As you can see in the image below, the outfeed fence is set even with the cutting edge of the bit at its highest point.  The infeed fence is set just a bit back from that.  For this example (and when I actually jointed this way) I set the infeed side of the fence back from the farthest reach of the cutting edge by the thickness of the inexpensive steel rule shown below.

I have some nice Starrett rules that my machinist father gave to me, but these will not work for this purpose because they are too thick.  The inexpensive rule you see on the router table is only about a sixteenth of an inch thick.  The Starretts are much thicker.

So the infeed side is set back about a sixteeth and that will be the depth of cut when I joint a board.  You can set yours as you like, but I wouldn’t advise taking any more than a sixteenth in a single pass.  You’ll chew up all your wood in no time if you do.

Once you have the sticks matched up well along the joints, you are ready to glue.

Note that I have my clamps ready.  Not only are they present, but they are set the correct distance apart so that all I have to do is put them in place and tighten the screws.  I also have the glue ready, wax paper laid down on the bench, and something to use for spreading the glue; though these are not shown here.

Note also that I am gluing all eight sticks at the same time.  Unless you are experienced with gluing, you may want to glue two sets of four and then go back and glue the two resulting boards together.  Gluing a lot at once tends to be difficult because the pieces slide all over.

Apply glue liberally!  The image below shows how I applied it when gluing both sides of each stick.  It is perfectly OK (and I really should have done it) to glue only one side of each stick, but if you are going to do that, you must apply about twice the amount of glue you see in the bead below.

You can use anything you like to spread the glue.  For a long time I used the side of my finger.  When I finally got tired of peeling glue off my fingers, I began using glue brushes or foam brushes depending on the application.  For this job I used cheap foam brushes I got on sale at Harbor Freight–a place I generally avoid like the plague and which I’ve heard referred to as “that bastion of barely acceptable quality”, a moniker which I think suits it very well.

Here is what good even gluing looks like:

You don’t have a lot of time at this stage, so move along briskly.  Once the glue is applied get the clamps on as fast as you can.  Clamp generously.

Now WAIT!  Resist the temptation to take the clamps off and mill this board! I’ll cover what’s next in the next installment.  Of course you can take the clamps off before then.  The glue is fully cured in 24 hours and you can safely remove the clamps after an hour or two–though I think it’s prudent to wait longer whenever possible.

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