Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Crafted Workshop: End Grain Cutting Board with CNC Inlay”.
What’S going on everybody, i’m johnny brooke from crafted workshop. Welcome to my first build video here on the make magazine, youtube channel super excited to be a part of the make channel. I’M building this awesome ingrained cutting board with two color inlay that was cut on the cnc for this video. So hopefully you guys enjoy and stay tuned to the end of the video for a link to my channel, where you can see a lot.
More builds like this all right, let’s get started so for this cutting board. I actually needed to build four individual in grain cutting boards and then combine them to make the final board. I had this huge piece of purple heart in my shop just waiting for the perfect project, and this seemed like a great way to use it.
The board was actually a lot thicker than i needed, so i resawed the board on my band saw to make it a little thinner and then squared it up on the jointer and planer once it was square. I ripped the board into strips, and the table saw with the board ripped into strips, i flipped the strips to change the orientation of the grain and then glued them together. This might seem counterintuitive, basically cutting a board up into strips and then just gluing it right back together, but this is really the only way to get that blocky ingrained cutting board.
Look in the vinyl board once the glue dried. I ran the board through the planer. Again to flatten it and then started cross cutting the blocks to expose the end grain i cross cut a piece turned at 90 degrees, so the end grain was showing and then continued this process until i ran out of wood with the board cut into blocks.
I arranged the blocks into their final orientation, flipping every other block over to give the board a cooler pattern. Next, i glued the blocks, together with the in-grain facing up to form the first in-grain cutting board. So i repeated this process basically identically. Three more times. First, with some hard maple to make up the other half of the base cutting board and then with cherry and walnut to create the boards for the inlays. I cross cut the purple heart and maple blocks about an inch and three quarters thick. So that would make the final base cutting board after flattening about an inch and a half thick. And then the cherry and walnut boards were about three quarters of an inch thick since they’re just inlays.
So this whole process was really time consuming. Just because the amount of time you have to spend waiting for glue to dry, but i ended up with four boards in total. Like you see here, the two smaller boards will make up the inlays in the finished board, or at least i thought they would we’ll get to that a little later. So next i needed to attach the purple heart board to the maple board.
I used my domino xl for this, but this was really just for alignment purposes. I didn’t want these boards slipping at all during the glue up, because any slippage would cause waste in the final board, so you could also use a biscuit joiner or dowels here. If you don’t have access to a domino so with the boards finished and flattened, it was time to start milling the inlays on the cnc, so first i’ve milled the inlays on the walnut and cherry boards. So these are actually upside down. So these pieces will be flipped over and inlaid into the baseboard, with the surface you’re seeing now facing down. So the first inlay i cut was the walnut background for the shield.
This was a really basic shape and i cut it with a quarter inch end mill and, as you can see, i had a little trouble with attaching the board to the spoil board and the board actually came up while it was being cut. But luckily this didn’t matter since this was again the bottom of the inlay. Next i cut the cherry inlay, but this ended up not really working out, so i’m not going to spend a ton of time showing the cutting process after the inlays were cut. I removed the excess on the bandsaw before moving on to the main board, so i needed to cut the pockets into the main board to receive the inlays, and this was a really nerve-wracking process, since i had put so much work into this cutting board. At this point, but it went really well so remove the bulk of the first pocket with a quarter inch end mill and then switch to an eighth inch end mill to get the corners and the very edges of the pocket to get that fine detail. Splitting the cnc process into two jobs, like this really speeds things up, as it would take a really long time.
If i tried to remove this much material with just an eighth inch, end mill. So next i glued in the walnut inlay into the pocket, and i just used plenty of glue. I used a waterproof glue in this case, titebond 3 and it fit perfectly. That’S the nice thing about the cnc.
Is it’s pretty accurate? I clamped it up in my vise and let it dry overnight so once it dried, i removed the excess on the cnc, but somehow lost the footage of that. It was pretty simple. I basically just used the same quarter, inch end mill and designed a file that was a basic rectangle that was slightly bigger than the overhanging inlay board. So the bit passed over this area cutting away the excess until it was within about a sixteenth of an inch of the surface of the board, and that was close enough for the next inlay. So next i cut the pocket for the cherry inlay.
This cutting process went really smoothly, but unfortunately the glue up didn’t end up working out so well. Well that didn’t work out so well. So this is the aftermath.
As you can see, the cherry was just really fragile. I should have done the border and the center section as two separate pieces, but basically, as soon as i started, to try to pound it in with a mallet it started cracking. I then went on to trying to use some calls and clamps, but that failed as well and uh just did not work at all. So on plan b for this inlay, i’m just gon na use a food safe, epoxy, and that should work nicely. I’Ve got some cool coloring for that, so i’m gon na go do that now, so the epoxy i used was a no voc food, safe epoxy, so it was safe to use on a cutting board. This cutting board is also mostly decorative, so it won’t see heavy use. Epoxy will scratch a lot more easily than ingrain wood.
So that’s something to consider if the cutting board you’re building will see daily use. So once i filled the pocket with epoxy, i used a propane torch to remove the bubbles and let the epoxy cure for 24 hours to remove the excess epoxy once it had cured. I first used my low angle, jack plane. This is a great tool to have on hand as a woodworker and is one of the most versatile hand planes. It’S amazing how effectively a tool like this is a removing material like this epoxy.
So once i remove the bulk of the epoxy, i took the cutting board to my drum sander to remove the rest of it now. Obviously, a drum sander is a luxury i know most of you probably don’t have one, so you can use a belt sander and get a pretty similar result. So next i clean up the edges of the board again with my low angle, jack plane, and i also used a block plane. First, i flattened the sides with a low angle, jack plane and then i chamfered the edges with a block plane. Next came lots and lots of sanding if you’ve never sanded in grain. I’M a little jealous ingrain is much harder than edge grain and takes a lot longer to sand and i probably spent a total of at least two hours sanding with a random orbit sander. I just put on a good podcast and settled in there’s really no way to speed up the process. So, finally, it was time for my favorite part of any build and that’s applying the first coat of finish whatever kind of piece it is.
It always comes to life when finish is applied and ingrained cutting boards are one of the most exciting examples of this, so just check out how everything pops, when the mineral oil hits that surface. So i applied plenty of mineral oil allowing the wood to soak it up for about an hour then came back and removed the excess. I waited a day and then repeated this process applying more mineral oil until the wood, basically wouldn’t soak up anymore. I added rubber feet to each corner of the board to keep it from sliding around during use and once the feet were added, the cutting board was done all right.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed this one. This was a really difficult project. I am still pretty new to the cnc, so i had to think through quite a bit all of these steps and the order of the steps that was the big trick, making sure i could do the inlays and then reorient the cutting board after flattening to do The next colors it was a it was a lot of thought went into it, but i think it turned out really nicely and if you want to check out more of my woodworking projects and my other projects check out my youtube channel at crafted workshop.
Thanks again, to make magazine for having me on their youtube channel and stay tuned for more videos from me on this channel, thanks again for watching you .