End Grain Cutting Board

With my wife's birthday coming up, I wanted to surprise her with something fun. She's a big fan of fancy kitchen stuff and had been eyeing my mom's custom butcher block from a couple Christmases ago, so I decided to make a high-end cutting board. I found some popular plans from another blog to help with this.

I purchased some purple heart and hard maple from a local supplier. Purple heart is extremely hard and dense. It's also rather expensive.
 

The varying thickness of the cuts will make a fun pattern when everything is complete. The next step is to alternate colors and glue it back together.
 

Once everything cures, it's back to the table saw to cut it again. It feels a little silly at first to glue pieces together only to cut them apart again, but it's entirely necessary to achieve an end grain cutting board, which are higher quality boards considered better for chef's knives. The easier way is just to mill a board to a long grain cutting board, but that would have been too easy.


The newly-cut pieces are turned sideways (end-grain up) and alternated in direction before being glued together. Several of the original pieces, seen in the background, had pits, breaks, or other problems with them that made them unsuitable for a cutting board. As a result, the final board ended up shorter than I had planned, but it's still a good size.


Unfortunately, an end grain piece can't go through my friend's planer safely, so achieving a uniform thickness on all surfaces turned into a couple hours on his belt sander instead. It took forever, but the result was nice. After that, a hand sander smoothed out the board with finer sand paper.


The board was seasoned with several coats of butcher block oil. Here you can see the first coat adding some character to the wood.


Lastly, I added some rubber feet to the board. A block like this would be fine without the feet, but I wanted them to help prevent slipping on the counter, to help the board dry after washing, and because of a knot on the underside that I worried might otherwise trap food particles.





Despite its size, the cutting board was my most ambitious project to date, in part because I lacked the tools to do the cuts, planes, and sanding. With the proper tools in the garage, this would have been a lot easier, but still rather time consuming.

The board itself turned out great and my wife was ecstatic. She refused to use it for a while, worrying that she'd ruin it. Now she uses it all the time. It's something I hope will last for a long, long time.