i've been collecting a lot of scrap walnut
from some of my past projects and i haven't really known what to do with it until right
now i'm going to make myself an end grain cutting board out of scrap walnut and an extra
piece of hard maple that i had laying around so without further ado don't forget to subscribe
like and comment and let's get to it the first thing i'm gonna do is take my dewalt planer here and take everything down
to three quarters of an inch thick now i've got everything all planed down to
three quarters of an inch thick i'm going to go ahead and run everything through the
table saw and rip it down to one and five eighths inch thick then i'm going to
glue everything up and run it through the planer again to take it down to the final
thickness of one and a half inches thick that means each of my sections of my board are
going to be one and a half inches thick okay we've got all of those strips cut up and
if we were doing an edge grain cutting board we'd basically be done we just have to glue this
thing up run it through the planer and make it square but we're not we're doing an end grain
cutting board which means i have to glue this all up and then cut it into pieces and then stand
it up on its end and then reassemble it again so the next step for us is going to be
to glue all this up and then let it dry before i get started with this glue up i just want
to point out that i'm using tight bond 3 which is non-toxic and fda approved for indirect food
contact i'll put a link to this in my description this glue is also waterproof when
dry and has a longer working time be sure to use plenty of clamps
for good even clamping pressure all right this thing's pretty
much ready to go we're gonna let this thing sit overnight and
see how it looks in the morning today is a new day and the reason i know that is
because i'm wearing a different colored t-shirt so i went ahead and removed our cutting board from
the clamps and the glue up turned out really well but now i need to go ahead and
flatten it the planer before i cut it into strips to expose the end grain all right now that we're done playing this
board the next step for me is to rip this into 1-5 8 slices and that will expose the end
grain so we kind of see what we're working with in addition it's going to be sort of setting the
thickness of the board my plan is still playing off about an eighth of an inch so i'm leaving
an extra eighth inch so i can get that one and a half inch of thickness so let's take it over
to the table saw now and rip this into pieces well that turned out a lot better than
i thought it would so that's a win um so we got one more glue up now uh to glue
all these pieces together but before i do that i'm gonna try and randomize these a little
bit they're pretty similar no matter which way you go but i still think that i add a
little bit more texture and randomness if i flip-flop them so i'm gonna flip-flop a few of
these boards and then i'm gonna throw it back up into the clamps and glue it up and then we wait
another day and then i'll see you guys tomorrow i like to remove any excess dry glue to keep the board as flat as possible as
it slides through the planer with an end grain board remove a very small
amount of wood with each pass in the planer the orientation of the grain makes the
board susceptible to tear out or separation so the board is flat but as you can see there
is a lot of damage on the backside and this is kind of exactly what i was afraid of go
ahead and drop me a comment and tell me how you guys prevent this from happening on an end
grain cutting board using standard blades this isn't really that big of a deal though what
i'm going to do is take the table saw and just clean up that damaged edge which is why i
kept passing it through in the same direction i just want all the damage to happen on
one side once i saw it starting to happen so let's take over the table saw now and clean
up this edge and then square the board up if i were to do this again i would have squared up
the long edge with the ca glue trick in the next step and then cleaned off the short ends of my
crosscut sled this would have ensured the corners were perfect right angles i ended up getting
lucky and they were still pretty much spot on be sure to line up the straight edge
guide with the pattern on your board when sanding work your way through the grits up
to 120 then stop wet the board and let it dry then finish with 120 and then 240.
Wetting the
board will cause the grain to pop allowing you to sand it smooth this will keep the board smooth
longer i'm going to be adding rubber stoppers to this so it should be sitting a little ways off the
table so it should be pretty easy to pick up and i like the clean look of no handles so the next
thing i'm going to do is add a chamfer around the edge just to break this edge and make a little
softer and add a little bit of a cosmetic feature the board looks beautiful and a lot of people
will stop right there and there's nothing wrong with that but i want to add a juice groove to
this board so i need to make a juice groove jig so i'm actually going to put a link to
the video i use to make this juice group jig and i'm not taking any credit for it this person
and maybe other people have made the exact same jig can take all the credit for it that's fine
so let's build that jig i determined where i wanted the juice groove and then measured from
the edge of the board to the edge of the router plate to determine the width of the spacer
next i measured the rough size of the board using three quarter inch plywood i cut the base
of the jig a few inches bigger than the board on all sides to be able to accommodate
larger boards i might make in the future then i ripped some two and
a half inch router guides and some one inch spacers using the
measurements from the previous step i glued the guides and
spacers together with ca glue i placed the guides on the base
to determine the final length then i cut them to length on the table saw a
miter saw would have been a better choice for this once i was happy with them i added brad nails the guides get screwed to the base
to hold the board firmly in position now we have a jig and we
are ready to cut the groove when cutting your groove move in a direction that pushes the router toward the
guide and takes small passes well i screw up my juice group just a
little bit right about here but what i think i'm going to do is just try
and make the juice group slightly larger to try and clean that
up so let's see if that works the groove cleaned up pretty well and to
be honest i like the width of it better everything works out in the end i sanded the board one final
time with 240 grit sandpaper then i pre-drilled some holes
and screwed on the rubber feet i added a link to this food grade mineral oil
in the video description i'm wiping it on in this video but i would recommend soaking
the board in oil for the best protection thank you for watching this entire video guys i really appreciate it i could
not do this without your support please subscribe like and comment as well as
check out one of these other great videos see ya i have no idea what i'm doing