What's going on everybody! I'm Johnny Brooke,
welcome back to another Crafted Workshop video. In today's video, I'm going to show you how
to build this Walnut and copper serving board. These are great for parties, serving your
cheese and charcuterie boards on, and they also make awesome gifts, so you still have
plenty of time this holiday season to get one of these knocked out. Also, I do have new Crafted Workshop t-shirts
available. These will be on my website. I'll have a link in the cards and in the video
description below. Got a new color and also added this little #johnnysquat silhouette
of me squatting here on the arm just because that's kind of become an inside joke here
on the channel. Figured it'd be kind of a funny addition to the shirt. So definitely
go check those out, and without further adieu, let's go ahead and get started with the build. Last year, as you might remember, I built
some end grain cutting boards for Christmas gifts, and they were a really big hit.
This
year, I decided to change it up a bit and build serving trays instead, since you really don’t need two end grain cutting boards in your kitchen. These serving boards are similar to cutting
boards, and can even be used for cutting up things like cheese and fruit, but their main
purpose is to serve food fashionably. These boards are usually used for charcuterie (shout
out to Brad from Fix This Build That), cheese, dried fruit, nuts, etc, and are great for
entertaining. My mom found this really clever serving board
design by Meadors, a woodworking company in Charleston, and asked if I could make her
one. This is a gift for my parents, and I won’t be selling these, so if you want to
purchase one, check out Meadors. I’ll have a link in the video description to their original
version of this design. Anyway, I decided to build the serving tray,
actually two of them, out of Walnut, since it’s what I had on hand.
What you’ve seen
me doing so far is just dimensioning the rough Walnut on the jointer, table saw, and planer.
After getting the pieces to the same thickness and width, I cut all of the pieces to length
at the miter saw. Next, I glued all of the pieces into one big
chunk and set it aside to dry. The overall dimensions of the blank were 19 inches long
by 9 ½” wide by 3 inches thick.
I was resawing this blank to get two boards, but if you were
only making one, you’d only need it roughly 1 ½” thick at this point. Next, it was time to flatten the blank. Alright, so I've gotten the cutting board
blank out of the clamps, and just an FYI, this is for two cutting boards, that's why
it's so thick. Now, it's time to flatten it and then cut it in half, at least in my case,
and then we'll go ahead and get the pockets carved into it. But, as you can see, there's a little bit
of a rock to it, and if this was just a normal cutting board, I'd probably honestly just
run it through my planer. And if there was a tiny bit of twist, it wouldn't make any
real difference. But, since I'm going to be carving into this,
I want this thing to be pretty much dead flat. A great way to do that would be the jointer,
but this is too wide for my jointer, and I'm sure a lot of you guys don't have jointers.
Another great way to flatten a piece this big is with your planer and a planer sled.
I'm going to be using a very, very simple
planer sled. This is basically just a piece of MDF. This one's a little bigger than I
need but I don't want to cut it down because I use this if I need to flatten bigger pieces,
and then I'm just going to add a little toe kick so that the board can't be shot out the
back if any of the kind of adhesive fails. And then to attach it down to the board, I'm
going to use hot glue.
To get rid of the rock, I'm going to add a little scrap, there is
not much rock here, so this little scrap should do the trick. Just going to hot glue that
right under there, that will remove the rock and then I can pass this through the planer.
So let's go ahead and do it! After hot gluing the blank to the planer sled,
I passed it through my planer to flatten to top surface. Once that face was flat, I removed
the blank from the planer sled, flipped it over, and then passed it through the planer
until the other face was flat.
While I’m planing, let’s talk about the
sponsor of this week’s video, Arrow Fastener. Arrow makes a wide variety of fastening tools
including staple guns, nailers, glue guns, riveters, and more. You've seen me use their
hot glue gun and brad nailer in this video. I have a ton of projects featuring Arrow tools
coming up, so stay tuned, and if you'd like to learn more about Arrow Fastener, check
out the link in the video description below.
After planing, since I was going to be resawing
the blank, I jointed one edge prior to resawing. Over at the bandsaw, I resawed the blank into
two equal pieces. I didn’t have a resaw blade installed, so this went a little slower,
but I was left with a relatively clean surface. Off camera, I passed the two blanks through
the planer again to bring them to the same thickness. Next, it was time to route the pockets into
the top of the serving board. There are a few ways to do this, but I decided to get
some practice with my new Inventables X-Carve. If you don’t have access to a CNC, you could
make the same pockets using a router jig and a template bit, or you could find someone
else's CNC to use like a Makerspace or maybe a friend of yours.
I will have a link to the Easel project in
the video description. Easel, in case you don't know, is a free software from Inventables,
and I’ll have an affiliate link in the video description below if you’d like to sign
up and play around with the software. In addition to cutting the pockets, the X-Carve
also cut the blank to final size, rounding the corners and mitering one corner.
Again,
this could all be done with regular woodworking tools, but it was a fun challenge to create
this shape entirely in Easel. After the X-Carve finished up, I moved over
to the router table to route the grooves for the copper banding that goes along the perimeter
of the serving board. To route the groove, I used a ¾” straight
bit and made the cut in two passes, turning around the board 180 degrees after each pass.
I set the depth of cut using the copper as my reference. Somehow, I managed to screw up pressing the
record button during the routing, so this is the only clip I have of the actual routing,
but I think you probably get the idea. I made a pass, flipped the board around, and then
made the second pass to get my 1 inch wide groove.
I did this on all four edges. Next, I headed over to the bench and rounded
over the corners inside the grooves with a file. Rounding these corners allows the copper
to bend around the corner much easier. I really need to pick up some wood-specific rasps,
so if you have any recommendations, I’d love to hear them in the comments below. Once the corners were rounded, it was time
to start installing the copper. I picked up this copper flat bar from Amazon, and I’ll
have a link in the video description to the exact piece I ended up ordering.The flat sections
are pretty self explanatory, so we’ll skip ahead to one of the corners. First, I attached the copper next the corner
using these copper-plated screws I found. To bend the copper around the corner, I used
a dead blow mallet in addition to just bending it by hand. If I bent the copper just by hand,
the radius of the bend ended up much larger, so it was best to start the bend by hand and
then finish it with a mallet.
After bending, I kept adding screws, roughly
spaced every 4 inches. To install the screw, I first drilled a small
hole slightly smaller than the threads on the screws, through the copper and into the
wood. With that hole drilled, I widened the hole in the copper, making a clearance hole.
This allows the screw to pass through the copper without the threads coming into contact
with the metal. Finally, I countersunk the holes so that the heads of the screws would
be flush with the copper. The trickiest part of the build was the corner
where the copper isn’t wrapped around the serving tray. I got this measurement slightly
wrong, but it turned out pretty well anyway.
To figure out where I needed to make the bend,
I measured the width of the board and marked a line. Next, I removed the copper from the board
and clamped it to my workbench, with the bend line right at the edge of the vise
jaws. Once again, I bent the copper using a combination of hand pressure as well as
the dead blow mallet. As I said, there was something I didn’t
account for properly during this process, most likely the bend radius, as, when I went
to reattach the copper, the corner was slightly out of square. Rather than try and re-bend
it, I just decided to leave it. I was afraid that if I overworked the copper, it might
become brittle and break, and this piece of copper was about $40. I just continued adding screws until I wrapped
around the entire board and got back to the start of the copper.
I marked where I needed
to cut the copper and used my portaband to cut it to length. A hacksaw would work fine
here. I purposely cut the copper a little long on
the first cut, and went back and trimmed it to final length on the second cut. After cutting,
I filed any sharp edges and then screwed it down to the end just like the rest of the
copper. To clean up the copper, I used a scotch-brite
pad, and this left it with a really nice, satin sheen.
I was honestly amazed at
how well this worked and at just how good the copper looked after this. Before applying finish, I rounded over all
of the edges using an ⅛” radius roundover bit. This didn’t really work that well,
since the bearing was actually riding on the copper rather than the wood, so I had to do
a lot of sanding to blend the corners. I sanded up the board up to 180 grit before applying
finish. For the finish, I kept it really simple and
just applied a few coats of mineral oil. Since this board won’t see a ton of use, mineral
oil will be just fine.
I actually used plain old mineral oil on the end grain cutting boards
I built last Christmas and, after using my cutting board almost every day since then,
it still looks great, even without re-oiling. Once the finish was applied, the serving board
was done! Alright, hopefully you guys enjoyed this one.
I'm really happy with the way this turned out. This Walnut is gorgeous as usual, I think
Walnut has just become kind of my standard wood of choice here on this channel. The copper
just looks awesome with it. Really beautiful piece and, again, I will
have a list of all the tools and materials I used in the video description below if you
want to build one of these for yourselves. If you don't already, go ahead and get subscribed
to the channel. I put out new project videos like this pretty much every week, and you
can go ahead and like the video and leave a comment if that's your thing. Alright, thanks
everybody for watching and, until next week, happy building!.