End Grain Butcher Block Cutting Board.

Jonathan Ellis
by Jonathan Ellis
5 Materials
$25
2 Days
Medium

Hello! I'd like to show you how you can create this lovely end grain cutting board with a few wood species and some glue! Enjoy the tutorial. If you like it, please feel free to subscribe and follow me on YouTube, thanks!

I start off by cutting Walnut to 2H x 2W x 12 3/8L. I leave a little extra on the ends to be trimmed off at the end of the glue up process. I make 5 of these pieces.

I then cut 20 pieces of maple at 2H x 1W x 1 3/4L. Be sure to cut properly so that your 2 inches are the height and the end grain is facing up and down.

I start to dry fit everything and see how it looks. After this, I put the maple in one row all together then measure the difference in which I divide by 4 to create the spacers in between the maple.

I cut 16 of these walnut spacers for between the maple at 2H x 1/2W x 22/32nd long.

Now the sapele wood is between the maple and the walnut. This wood is cut to 2H x 1/4W x 22/32nd long.

Check for gaps and pieces that may need sanding before gluing up! I hand sanded some of the walnut in between the sapele to keep things even and flush.

Glue it all together and make sure glue is on all edges that need it! I'm using Titebond Ultimate 3. Its a better glue for cutting boards than the regular stuff.

Clamp it up overnight and come back in the morning. Make sure its on a surface it can't stick to permanently! I laid paper underneath.

I threw it in the planer. Ultimately you can use a belt sander so long as you level it out and keep it flat at the end. That's what I did after planing because the orbital sander did next to nothing since end grain is so strong!!!

Check out that beautiful cutting board! I used Feed-N-Wax from Lowes and hand wiped it on, let it sit 10 mins, then wipe off excess. You're all finished! That wasn't so hard now was it??? You can definitely accomplish this with less tools but it will be hard work indeed! If you have any questions please feel free to ask me in the comments. I will be selling some of these in the near future on Etsy, so stay tuned or follow my YouTube and Facebook for updates! If you like my work please follow me on youtube and give this video a thumbs up, I upload this content for free! Thank you so much for viewing my tutorial and have a lovely day!

A lovely shot of the cutting board. Enjoy! Please share!

A video of the entire project with narration. Please subscribe and like if you enjoy my content! I appreciate you!

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  • Michele Michele on Jan 05, 2020

    I love to make n create lol I have refurbished and saved many pieces of furniture from the Good Will Store

  • R.C. Leach R.C. Leach on Jan 15, 2020

    I hate to raise this question or comment, because you seem to have way more experience than I do, but Many years ago, I had an old pro tell me why I got the dark arcs on my cut pieces of wood, and he said it was because my blade and fence were not perfectly parallel. I checked it out, and he was right. The front (cutting "edge")) of the saw won't leave a mark, but when the "heel" of the blade comes along, it rubs hard, but does not cut off the burnish marks, because the teeth are facing away from the workpiece. Try positioning the fence using a square. Get the fencenearly tight enough, and bump it into alignment with your hand, or a piece of scrap wood.

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