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.

Folding Workbench

I made my own workbench from a very sturdy, solid (65 lbs) door just a year ago using plans from another blog. It has been a great bench, but I find myself increasingly running out of space as heavy tools, like the heavy scroll saw, increasingly find a permanent location on the bench.

I needed a work space that would be kept clear to use for occasional projects. If nothing will be atop the new bench most of the time, it would be nice to have it store away easily to take up less garage space, so I set about creating a folding workbench.

I started by mounting a 2x4 at the same height as my existing workbench.


The legs were also made from 2x4. To make them sturdier, I cut some rabbet joints. Lacking fancier tools, I used a circular saw to make the initial cuts, followed by the hammer and then the chisel to smooth it out. The three legs were all cut at once, which saved a bit of time.



A neighbor moved out and gave us the top to a modular desk she was about to throw away. With one straight side, it's a perfect fit. In a pinch, another solid wood core door would have worked, too, but the desk is larger and has a fun shape.


The legs are mounted along a 2x4, which is connected by a couple hinges. A 2x3 along the bottom of the legs lends the bench more stability. The 2x3 has rabbets cut into it the same way as before, which help support the legs and make it look nicer.


Three strong hinges are added to connect the bench to the wall's studs. They don't support the bench when it's down--the 2x4 on the wall does that--but they support the full weight of the bench when it's folded up, so it's important they're robust.

The bench turned out well. It's easy to pull out and fold away with the gate latch up top and it's large enough and strong enough for most weekend projects.