Set of cutting boards made for family members in London, England.
After three years of living under lockdown restrictions and health scares, my wife and I decided to travel to London, England, to visit her extended family. I wanted to make something special and personal for each family, but had limited time in light of my other commitments. My solution was to build nine unique cutting boards, and let each family pick the style that piqued their fancy. Read on to find out why I left for London with only five boards...
I should explain here that when I use the term cutting boards, the reference could also mean charcuterie board, serving tray or cheese board. I know there are nuanced definitions of each of these, but for my purposes how they are used by the family will decide what they are called. So I'm referring to them all simply as cutting boards.
The Woods:
I wanted to make these handmade gifts from mostly local, domestic woods. I went through the stock I had on hand and selected suitable pieces with interesting figure. I had previously bought rough sewn walnut from a friendly woodworker in Mamaroneck, New York, who posted his extra stock on Craigslist. He told me the tree was originally milled in Connecticut and seasoned for a year by air drying in a stack with "stickers" (small sticks of wood that separate each slab to allow natural air to flow around the slabs). I selected my project slabs from the stack originally in his yard. Many of the cutting boards would be made from that dark brown wood, but why not add brighter touches of elegance and pizzaz to the design?
I use colorful, exotic wood species sparingly to enhance the aesthetic quality of projects. These cutting boards include yellowheart, which comes from Brazil, and African padauk. Yellowheart trees can grow to 130 feet tall and 30 inches in diameter, with large 10 inch leaves and creamy white, fragrant flowers.
Long known for its red-orange hue, Padauk grows in tropical climates and has been used in making fine furniture, musical instruments, and many other beautiful things for hundreds of years. It is said that King Solomon used padauk for the pillars of his temple 3,000 years ago. Neither yellowheart nor padauk is endangered.
Another accent wood I use is purpleheart, known for its distinctive purple color and exceptional hardness. However, the wood contains natural oils that make it challenging to machine, dulling and clogging saw blades and drill bits with resin. As such, small imperfections and tearout that sometimes result from working with purpleheart become an integral part of the handmade workpiece. The large, exotic purpleheart trees are most commonly found in the Amazon rainforest, and the lumber is used in fine furniture, flooring, artistic pieces, and even as structural elements. Purpleheart is not endangered..
Making the Boards:
I only had a few days to make these gifts. For the cutting board designs, I went through my "dream book" where I save project pictures that appeal to my sense of aesthetics, and browsed online for more ideas. I then created some templates that I thought might work.
The air dried boards I selected were a bit warped and twisted. After crosscutting the walnut and maple stock to rough length, and ripping many in half to preserve thickness during the milling process, I jointed two sides of every board on my Jet combo machine. I then planed the opposite sides flat and square in the planer configuration. This Jet combo machine is both a planer and jointer, and has a helical cutting head consisting of dozens of small cutting inserts, producing a very smooth surface on most woods even when they contain uncooperative grain patterns.
Once the individual components were milled, thicknessed, and cut to rough length, I carefully selected pieces for each cutting board, matching color and grain patterns, and aligned them with the templates. I experimented with the look of each cutting board by inserting accent strips in different configurations to achieve designs that resonated with me. The designs were then glued up and held together with many clamps until dry. The board glue-ups usually dried by the next day where I scraped off the dried glue, jointed and planed both sides flat and smooth, ripped the edges down to rough width on the tablesaw, and crosscut to final length on the miter saw. I then cutout each board to its template pattern using my Rikon bandsaw, and sanded the resulting curves smooth using a spindle sander.
More to come...