The "unit slab". It's a term I made up..... It's the assembled unit that is then cross cut and flipped to expose the end grain, and then reglued to from the board.
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Split Square End Grain Cutting Board
A belated wedding gift for a friend, I used woods in the color of his Alma Mater to create this cutting board. As always, I opted to go end-grain over face-grain. You just can't beat the durability and cleanliness of an end grain board, especially if you are using tight grain structure woods like maple and walnut. Anyways, it was a relatively frustration free project and my buddy seemed to like it. Win, win.
Required Resources: 5 hours, $40
Size: 12" x 12" x 1.25"
Materials: Walnut, Maple, Paduak, Titebond III (Food safe wood glue)
Finish: Howard's Butcher Block Conditioner (Canuba + Bees Wax + Mineral)
Tools: Table Saw, Stationary Belt Sander, Orbital Sander
New Techniques: Not much new on this build, other than the split square checker pattern. Splitting these squares required an extra cut, glue up and planing step. But, other than that, and with all the practice I'd had on other boards, this build was a cake walk.
Lessons Learned:
Choose Quality Wood: The major mistake I made on this project was using lower quality wood. I was trying to save some money on the build and decided to use both common grade maple and walnut. I knew it was a gamble and to be fair, the walnut selections turned out great. The maple, however, when cut open for the fan-out stage, had pits, occlusions and mold staining (not of the aesthetic spalted nature. Instead, a gross pea green, splotchy stain). Once oiled, the stains didn't look too bad, but still it was a bummer to cut the "unit slab" open to find glaring imperfections. Other than springing for quality woods, I could have tried bleaching the maple to get rid of the green stains. I ran out of time to attempt this; but, I'll likely give it a go if I run into this issue again.
