Be sure to drop by Marc’s place, and also please remember that beginning your online shopping here at LarryEiss.com is a great way to say “Thank you.”

It was a really big deal for me to get one, so I plan to take good care of it. There are several important aspects to saw care, but today I want to talk about maintaining the cast iron top. This applies to band-saws, drill-presses, and jointers as well.

Good maintenance of the cast iron surfaces of these tools makes them easier to use, and safer. The reason for both benefits is the same; the wood slides more freely across a well-maintained top. Free movement without unexpected hitches helps minimize the chance for kickback. Another benefit is the great feeling you get from working with equipment that looks like new. I hate to see rust on my cast iron–does that make me anal-retentive?

When I first got the table saw, I was concerned about how to keep the top rust free. It was in a location where I had to park my tractor with the snowplow attached during the winter. Moisture was a certainty. I read a lot about the topic. Some craftsmen use spray-on products, others endlessly discuss the merits and drawbacks of silicone lubricants. I fall passionately into the “don’t ever use silicone” camp. It leads to finish problems such as orange peeling, which makes dimples or pock marks in your finish.

After thinking a long time about the various ways to maintain my table saw top, I settled upon the use of paste wax. It seems easiest, and it’s very inexpensive. Here is what I do.

First, lower the blade completely and clear everything from the top of your saw. Don’t even think about trying to make it seem like I am the only one who puts things on his saw top. Maybe it’s not on the iron, but you can bet the extension wing has stuff all over it (at least some of the time) in my shop.

Next remove the fence, or at least make sure it is completely out of the way.  While you’re removing things, take out the faceplate and remove your guard, splitter, or riving knife.

Now find your random-orbit sander (ROS) and a 220-grit disc. You can use 150 or anything finer, but I think 220 is a good balance between speed and aggressiveness. Anything more course would feel uncomfortable to me because I don’t like obvious scratches in the top and I sure don’t want to ruin the flatness. Green Scotch-brite pads also work well. These pads are made in round versions to fit a ROS, and in rectangular form for hand use. In practice, you can use any of them with the ROS because the hook-and-loop fasteners on the sander grab the pads very nicely.

Turn on the sander and go to town. If you started with a top that is already darkened by old rust, you might try a courser abrasive, and I suppose it may be impractical to get the top back into like-new condition. Even so, you should find the condition is greatly improved, along with the usability.

My Table Saw Top after Sanding with 220-grit

This is My Bandsaw Top After Sanding

The tops look pretty nice, and it is tempting to go no further.  That would be a big mistake.  The cast iron is at great risk now because you have cleaned off everything that might have been protecting it from rust.  Take it from me.  Cast iron can rust very rapidly.  I have actually watched my saw top rust!

When we first moved to this location I had a need to bring some planks into the shop through one of the big ten-foot overhead doors.  I was in a hurry because it was raining hard and I didn’t want the to be soaked.  What I failed to think about was the fact that it was very cold in the shop and the wet air outside was about 20 degrees warmer than everything inside the shop.  Condensation was immediate and severe.  You may have seen this effect on a cold concrete floor at one time or another.  While I stood there, the cast iron surfaces glazed over with rust.  I tried to dry it with a towel, but all I did was make crazy patterns in the rust.  It was heartbreaking.  Fortunately it turned out not to be too difficult to fix.  It was this experience, however that led me to used the ROS for sanding rather than doing it manually.

The next step is to apply the wax.  One caveat is in order here.  Some wax products have ingredients like silicone in them.  Car waxes often fall into this category.  What you want is old-style floor wax such as Johnson’s Past wax, which is what I use.

Paste Wax Without Silicone or Other Additives is a Must

Find a clean cotton cloth.  I use old tee shirts for this.  Form a bunch like a kind of pad and charge it with wax by rubbing it around in the wax container.  Apply it liberally to the cast iron and your extension wings.  (Note that you can click on these pictures to see them larger.)

Liberal Wax Application

Let the wax sit a while.  Once the wax has begun to dry, use a clean cotton cloth to buff it out.  You can use the same tee shirt you used for application as long as you fold it in such a way as to prevent more wax from being applied.  I also find that I re-fold the tee a few times as I am buffing because it gets gummed up with wax and using a fresh spot works better for buffing.

Here’s the finished surface.

Good as New!

Below are links to help you find the products I use.  It helps me when you begin your online shopping here.

Larry

Essentially boiled linseed oil is simply linseed oil with a drying agent added.  It soaks into the wood and brings out the beauty of the grain as only a non-building finish can.  Polyurethane provides better protection from liquids, but it can’t match the grain-popping quality of boiled linseed oil.

Another benefit is that the finish can be reapplied any time.  Since it doesn’t build up on the surface of the wood, its easy to rejuvenate it, should you find it desirable, by simply applying more oil.

Application is easy too.  I like to put the finish into a small jar and use a foam brush to apply it liberally.  I re-apply oil to any places that absorb a lot of it and once the wood is well saturated, I wipe the excess off with a clean cotton cloth–usually an old tee shirt.  Some people like to apply several coats.  Some buff the last coat with four-ought (0000) steel wool.  I personally apply one liberal coat, adding a bit to absorbent areas, wipe it down, and let it dry.

Drying takes a while.  In my experience 24 hours is insufficient for a piece you plan to bring in the house, which is pretty much all of them.  Boiled linseed oil has a distinctive, but not really unpleasant, aroma.  Before it is fully cured, this is much more apparent.  Too much of it may increase household strife, so to speak.  Additionally, the wood will feel a little tacky to the touch for a while.  For sufficient curing, I find that a week is about right, but as they say, your mileage may vary.

It can be important to consider wood species.  Boiled linseed oil works best on darker open-grained woods, such as oak or walnut.  It turns the natural dull brown of walnut into a deeply glowing thing of real beauty that must be seen to be appreciated.  Part of the way it does this is by soaking into the open pores.  That accounts for the “depth” of the glow.  Another aspect of the beauty it yields is that the oil imparts a yellow/orange tint to the wood.  Because of this, boiled linseed oil should be used on light colored woods such as maple only after due consideration of the effect the added color will have.  Test it on a scrap before deciding.

Here is a link to Boiled Linseed Oil on Amazon.com

It helps me when you begin your online shopping from links on my pages.

From 2000 to 2004 The Most Wonderful Woman in the World (TMWWitW) and I lived on 57 bucolic verdant acres about 30 minutes south of our present location.

We moved there from Long Island, NY (LI) (which is probably the worlds foremost bastion of keep-up-with-the-Jones’s competitive consumerism).  While on LI I became interested in woodworking.  To be honest, I think I had always been interested.  I took wood shop once in my junior-high-school years.  Be that as it may, it was Long Island where I first got serious about maybe someday being able to build furniture.  Really, it’s all Norm Abrams’ fault.  Norm and that blasted New Yankee Workshop television show of his.  Thank God he has retired from that, so I no longer feel the need to have a shop as perfect as The New Yankee.

But I digress–a very great distance.

While at Red Fox Run, our glorious 57 acres, I began accumulating the equipment “necessary” to be a “real” woodworker.  I’ll probably talk more about my personal woodworking journey in some future article–knowing me–but for now let’s just leave it at that.

Another thing I did there was to build a prototype (in Pine) of a plant stand for TMWWitW.  This was a copy of a plant stand her grandmother had in her house while TMWWitW was growing up.

The Original (Venerated) Plant Stand

This venerated piece of furniture came to have its abode among us in later years.  It was time-worn, and it seemed like a great idea for me to augment replace it with a newer better version, so while the original was in Oak (with veneer) I determined to build a prototype in Pine.

It was, and is, my feeling that the prototype should become fuel with which to heat the house once the real version was constructed by “The Craftsman” from more acceptable furniture-grade lumber.  That was not to be, however.  TMWWitW placed the prototype within the confines of the house and proceeded to use it for its supposed purpose.  A Christmas Cactus, dying from lack of water, sits on it today. (In the picture below the cactus is shown in … more pristine condition.)

The Pine Prototype (Firewood) Plant Stand

My embarrassment knew no bounds, so once we moved to our present location, I determined to make it my business–after finishing the promised Cherry Shaker side tables (don’t get me started on that)–to build not one, but two copies of this wonderful plant stand from American Black Walnut.

I completed these two Walnut stands TODAY!  I know; there are no pictures.  I’ll post pictures once the finish has dried and I can get the stands into the studio.  For now, please celebrate with me the end of a four-year process.  The plant stands are finished!  Hurrah, hooray!

Don’t forget: If you get enjoyment or value here please let me know by beginning your online shopping using a link on my site.  It makes a real difference to me, and it costs you nothing.

Larry

I thought I had said all I have to say on that topic, but this week my daughter read me an excerpt from a book she had borrowed from the library. The book is entitled Green Housekeeping and was written by Ellen Sandbeck. On pages 118 and 119, Ms. Sandbeck recounts the Clive and Ak study in a much clearer way than the version of the information to which I had earlier linked. Consequently, I thought I’d mention the book here so that people searching for information on food-safe woods can find it more easily. Google has scanned this work, and you can see the referenced pages here.

As it turns out, other sites also reference the study. One such site is that of cutting board maker, BW WoodWorks®. There are a number of others as a quick search on “Cliver and Ak” will attest.

Given the apparent lack of any scientific evidence to the contrary, coupled with the experiential evidence of cutting board users themselves, it appears that wood is the way to go. One important question that always arises is, “which species of wood is safest?” The study tested at least seven species and found very similar results.

As I said in my earlier article on the subject, “I am certainly not an expert in biology, nor am I a doctor or anything remotely connected to those professions. I am simply still living and healthy after showing no concern about my wooden cutting boards.”

Please; go and read this information for yourself. I’ll be using wood.

In any event, I actually used only 14 of the short strips to make my board. The next step is to glue the short strips together to form the cutting board.

Turn each strip 90-degrees so that the end grain is up. Look at the pattern formed by the grain and the blocks themselves and once again arrange them so that the pattern is pleasing to you. When you have done this, begin turning all the strips (except the last one) 90-degrees again so that a side is now on top. It’s important that you turn them all in the same direction, all to the right, or all to the left.

Turning the strips in preparation for gluing.

The last strip is left upright because this time around we will glue only one side of each block. Apply the glue liberally. When you’re finished, it should look something like this. I used a foam brush to spread the glue.

You should consider doing this glue-up in two sessions to prevent the strips sliding around too much. If you have enough clamps, you can do what I did and use cauls to keep the strips aligned.

To use clamping cauls, be sure that you cover the ends of the strips with wax paper or shiny tape so you don’t glue the cauls to the cutting board.

Here is what my final glue-up looked like:

Note the nice even beads of glue. This is what you want to see. It lets you know there is plenty of glue in the joints so none of them will be glue-starved and weak.

I had several left-over strips and decided to glue those up as well. I’ll make interesting coasters from them when I have some time.

Once the glue has cured, remove the clamps. Because this board is small enough to fit through my thickness planer, I planed it flat. You can also use a belt sander, a router with a special jig, or a hand plane to flatten the end grain. If there is more excess glue than you feel comfortable machining, use a sharp chisel or paint scraper to remove the cured glue.

At the beginning of Stage IV I mentioned that I’d have a little more to say about gluing in the cold. Below is a picture of the way this board looked after more than a day of drying. My shop was quite cold–around the 40-degree point–and the result was extremely long curing time for the glue. I have serious concerns about the strength of these joints, though I have to say that the board machined without incident and has held together for a while indoors.

You can see that the glue isn’t really dry.

Take note of the way I eventually arranged the sticks to give me a pleasing pattern. The two strips on either end look darker than the others because the nap of the grain (like the nap of a carpet) runs in the opposite direction from the strips in the center. This is because I flipped these strips end-for-end. You can also see that even with the clamping cauls in place, the strips shifted a little during gluing and are not perfectly aligned. We’ll take care of that in a minute, but for now let’s talk about how to plane end grain.

End grain can be run through a thickness planer just like edge grain, but there are couple of important points you’ll want to keep in mind. First, there will be significant chip out on the trailing end. Second, you need to take very small bites because end grain is hard on planer knives.

If your strips are uneven, be sure to set the planer higher than usual so that at no point are you taking off too much material on a single online credit card processing,card credit event online processing registration,online credit card processing systemapplication card citi creditinstant online credit card applicationuk credit card applicationcheap credit card ukstudent credit card applicationcredit card company,negotiate with credit card company,discover credit card companydiscover student credit cardfixed rate credit cardsecured visa credit cardjuniper bank credit cardbad card credit creditapply for capitol one credit card,apply card credit,apply for visa credit cardpay down credit card debt,card credit debt paybest card credit dealpaying off credit card debtapply card credit discovercard consolidation credit debt graphcard chase credit online paymentbank card chase credit one,bank card credit disney from one visa,bank one credit cardcitibank credit card online applicationcard credit free online0 card credit interest rate,0 interest credit card,0 balance card credit interest rate transfercard credit program rewardpay on wal mart credit card,card credit mart wal,wal mart credit card centercard credit mutual providian washingtoncard credit interest list lowassociate bank credit cardcredit card debt consolidation loanbad credit business credit card,business credit card consolidation,business credit cardorchard bank unsecured credit cardcard credit mart online wal,wal mart credit card,card credit mart services walcard consolidation credit debt freewal mart credit card applicationmerrick bank credit carddebt reduction solution credit card,card credit debt reduction solutionapplication approval card credit instantcompare credit card offerbank card credit monogramcard citi credit studentdebt reduction credit card consolidationcredit card bad debt ukcredit card secured master card,partially secured credit card,secured credit cardbad card credit credit free no,free bad credit credit cardapplication card citibank creditdownload ringtones motorola,motorola ringtones software download,download motorola v180 ringtonescingular ringtones coupon100 free mobile ringtones virginfree phone ringtones sprintfree new ringtones,download free new ringtones,chinese free new ringtones year pass. I find that a sixteenth (1/16) is about the most I am comfortable asking the planer to take in one pass. I like taking only a thirty-second (1/32) much better.

Here is what to expect in terms of chip out. Remember that this board is made from cherry. If you use a more open-grained wood such as oak, expect even more.

Don’t be overly concerned about this. We’ll mill it off in the next step.

The first thing to do is square one side. You can use a jointer, router, or table saw to do this. I prefer the table saw for ease and efficiency, though it is technically less accurate the way I do it–but then, this isn’t furniture so it really doesn’t have to be perfect.

I set up the first cut as a crosscut on the table saw, but I treat the second one as a rip.

The first cut is made using the miter gauge. I place the edge of the board that is closest to straight against a sacrificial fence attached to the miter gauge and position it so that the blade will remove the least material possible consistent with a clean straight edge.

The second and subsequent cuts are made against the rip fence as seen in the image below:

In the end, the cutting board looks like this:

I’ve said a couple of times that cutting boards aren’t furniture and therefor don’t require the same accuracy. Since we’ll be rounding the edges (or giving them some other treatment) small errors in squareness or differences in the thickness of border strips as compared to internal strips won’t be obvious.

I find it freeing to relax about my work in the shop. When I started out, I was reading the better woodworking magazines and looking at the amazing work turned out by the best craftsmen in the country. I began to realize that I was simply not as good as they are, and it almost made me want to give up on woodworking all together. (For what it’s worth, the same thing happened to me with photography just last year!) Now I take a more relaxed approach. If I am uptight about wasting wood or making a joint that doesn’t fit properly, I have a lot less fun and make a lot more mistakes. If I really screw up badly, I might waste an entire board that cost me maybe $25.00. Oh well! If I make a poor-fitting joint, I might have to make another copy of the part. Oh well! I even find it enjoyable to figure out how to recover from errors, even occasionally incorporating them into the project by altering the design slightly.

Now it’s time to decide on the edge treatment you want to give your board. Options include:

• None – just sand the corners so nobody gets hurt
• Bead – a fancy treatment seen on wainscoting that actually looks good on the edges of a cutting board
• Chamfer – applying a 45-degree angle to the edges for a modern look
• Round-over – this is the most common and popular

I chose round-over for this board. Edge treatment can be executed in a number of ways, but use of a router is the most efficient. I routed the edges of the first board I made using an edge guide and hand-holding the router. If you have a router table, using that is far better.

It’s important to take some time to consider where you want the bit set so that you get the desired profile. Round-over bits can leave an edge or just make a soft round corner. I wanted the latter, so I set my bit as shown below.

Make sure that you move right along (especially with cherry) to avoid producing any serious burn that you’ll have to sand out later. Stay relaxed though. All but the very worst burning can be sanded out. Don’t do anything that feels scary. Rout all four sides. On this board I did both top and bottom, but you can make the profiles different on each. I have done that in the past with great success.

I sanded the board with my random-orbit sander. You can also do it by hand–if you like pain–or using a belt sander if you’re very careful. Begin with a course grit like 60 or 80 and then move through grits roughly as follows: 150, 220, 320. If you really want to go nuts, you can buff with four-ought (0000) steel wool. If you decide to do that, I recommend waiting until after you raise the grain.

To my surprise, I discovered early on that when a cutting board gets wet the first time, the end-grain gets fuzzy just like edge grain can. You really need to deal with this before treating the board with mineral oil. This is done by deliberately raising the grain and then sanding it down one last time. To do this, simply get the entire board wet. Run water over the board. Once it has been completely flooded for a few seconds, dry it with a rag or towel. Set it aside to fully dry for a while. Once it is completely dry, sand it again using 220 grit and any finer grit you like. If you want to buff the board with steel wool, this is the time to do that as well.

This is what the board looks like after the sanding is done.

Now it’s time to add feet (if you want) and treat the board with mineral oil.

To treat the board, flood the surface with mineral oil. You can put oil in a shallow pan, or simply pour a puddle onto the surface of the board. Remove the bulk of the excess by scraping (use rubber or plastic to avoid scratches) or using a rag. Let the board sit for ten minutes or so and then treat it again. I find that two or three treatments is sufficient. Once you have completed the last treatment you can apply the feet.

Notice how the oil makes the grain pop!

For this board I am using simple rubber feet, but I have used wooden toy wheels and dowels. When I do that, I apply the feet first so that the oil does not interfere with gluing.

I find that brass hardware is a good idea because people will wash their boards and steel screws will get rusty and look bad.  Be certain that you pre-drill for the screws.  This is hardwood, not pine, after all!

Another important note about oil. It takes at least 24 hours before all the excess oil has come out of the board. During that time, you’ll need to wipe off the excess occasionally. You’ll know you are done when you no longer leave fingerprints after touching the board. That’s usually in about 48 hours.

Here is a picture of the finished board. This one is a good size for cutting vegetables or cheese. We quite often use one like this for serving crackers and cheese. In case you are wondering, I would normally sell a board like this for $75.00. I gave this one to my brother as a wedding gift.

Please don’t forget to support me by visiting the advertisers in the sidebars and/or using my vendor links when you shop. It costs you nothing, and I’ll appreciate it greatly.

This board is cured enough for machining:

So I removed the clamps:

For now, we need to flatten the board we’ve made. Earlier in the series I mentioned that life is much easier if you make the board small enough in one dimension to send it through your planer. An alternative is to make two pieces that can be planed, glue them together, and then simply flatten the single resulting joint with a hand plane, belt sander, or whatever. You can also opt to flatten the entire surface with a hand plane or belt sander if you want to build a board larger than the width of your thickness planer–or if you don’t have a thickness planer.

Rough goes in, smooth comes out:

After planing the board as shown above, here is what you have:

Once you have a flat board, ensure that the miter gauge on your tablesaw is 90-degrees to the blade as shown below.

Then square one end of the board.

When I did this, I was left with a piece of stock 34 and three-quarters inches long. The next step is to determine how thick I want the finished cutting board to be. Decide on the thickness you’d like and then apply the same formula for calculating how many cuts you can make in this much wood as we used back in Stage II of the project when ripping the two 35-inch planks.

I took a shortcut here. I wanted the board to be about an inch and a half thick, so I figured out how many times 1.5 inches goes into 34.75 inches. The answer was 23.1666. Knowing that, I tried three scenarios (20,22, and 21) while subtracting the appropriate number of saw kerfs. In the end I found that I could get 21 strips 1.5 inches wide with no trouble, so I selected that number. This would make a board longer than I wanted anyway, so I knew I’d have waste. I don’t mind that because it keeps me from succumbing to the temptation to cut the small end pieces when it no longer feels comfortable to do so. My policy is that it is better to waste wood than to remove body parts. In the end I got 19 strips and did not use them all. I also did not cut the entire length of the stock. Below is what I left at the end of my comfort zone:

To make the strips I first needed to set the fence for the 1.5 inch cuts. Since I would be crosscutting I couldn’t safely use the fence itself as a guide. Instead, I placed a guide block next to the fence and measured 1.5 inches from the guide block to the blade and then locked the fence at that location.

Note that the saw is unplugged any time I am working near the blade.

I used an old handscrew to fasten the guide block to the fence, positioning it far enough in front of the blade that the stock would clear the guide block before contacting the blade. This prevents accidents that can occur should the stock bind on the guide block (or fence if no guideblock were used–BAD IDEA) and then contact the blade at an angle, bind, and kick back. In addition, I used a sacrificial fence on the miter gauge.

Below are some shots of the setup:

I then proceeded to make the cuts. At first, I held the stock in place against the miter gauge by hand since there was plenty of room between me and the blade.

These pictures show the final moments of the first cut.

You may be wondering about the fact that the saw blade is always at rest in these pictures. In fact, I do stop the blade between most cuts so that I can safely remove the cutoff and scrap. I know that many others don’t do that, but I still have all ten fingers, and use them every day in my work. I just feel safer this way.

So I continued cutting strips from the stock:

When the stock got a little shorter, I began using a push block to hold it in place against the miter gauge.

In the end I had 19 strips, which made a block that was too long for my liking. I only used 14 in the final cutting board. That’s a lot of waste, I know. Chalk it up to this being my first board in a long time. I didn’t properly plan this when I cut the original plank into 35-inch sections. Next time, we’ll try to be more accurate.

We’ll get to that in the next stage of the project. For now, 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.

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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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.

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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