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Herringbone End-Grain Cutting Board
A few years ago, I decided that I wanted to make a herringbone end-grain cutting board. Recently, I had enough time so that I could do it.
The first question is how I would go about making it. The usual way is to glue up a “slice” the width of the cutting board, cross-cut that into lengths equal the depth of the cutting board, and then glue those together. What I mean by this is that one I could make one slice in the pattern (where the numbers represent colors or wood selections):
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And another in the pattern:
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And then alternate them as:
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This would be relatively easy to do, but it has the drawback that the vertical pieces in the above diagram (i.e. the 2’s and the 3’s) would be composed of two pieces, rather than being a single piece. I didn’t want to do that if it was avoidable.
What I really wanted to achieve was:
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The problem with this, however, is that there are no straight lines from one side to the other, so you can’t assemble it as strips. The only way to do this is to build it with a whole series of 1x2 rectangles.
Ideally, one would use a slow-setting (and water-proof) glue, apply the glue to all of the pieces, arrange them, and then clamp it to death. The problem with this was that I don’t have enough clamps, and if the glue started setting up before it was well clamped, then the pieces might end up with gaps between them. I was just afraid that this approach (even if I found an appropriate glue and had enough clamps) would either work perfectly, or it would work terribly; there would be only one shot to get it right.
So I decided on the slower but presumably safer approach of adding only a few rectangles at a time.
First, I cut and milled a number of strips of wood (Maple, Cherry, Black Walnut, and Meranti) to roughly 1x2 inches, and then I used my planer to clean up the edges and make them all the same size (in a 1:2 ratio). Then I cross-cut them into a bajillion pieces, each approximately 1˝ inches long. Then it was time to start the assembly and gluing. Note that unlike the diagrams above, I wanted the pattern running at a 45° angle. My final plan was:
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Starting it off was a pain, but once I got it started, the other pieces became easier. My basic unit of work was a “row”, where the “row” consisted of 5 rectangles of the same type of wood.
Initially, I tried gluing up all 5 rectangles at the same time. But this proved to be very difficult to do as the clamps tended to get in each other’s way.
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So I found it easier (but slower) to glue every other rectangle at the same time. Since I had 5 rectangles per row, that ended up alternating between gluing 3 rectangles and gluing 2 rectangles. This was much easier for managing the clamping.
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I would leave the clamps on for 30 minutes, and then I would take the clamps off, and clean off the squeeze-out. I figured that 30 minutes would be long enough for the joint to set, but not so long that the squeeze-out would turn into concrete. (The Titebond-III directions said to clamp for at least 30 minutes.)
I found it fairly easy to clean up the squeeze-out with a sharp chisel, but it had to be sharp. As the chisel got more and more glue on it (despite my efforts at wiping it off), it got less and less “sharp”, until I had to switch to a new chisel. Then halfway through the process, I had to sharpen my chisels before I could continue.
One of the questions I had going into the process was whether the pieces would line up OK, or whether over time they would get more and more uneven, resulting in gaps. The answer was mixed. For the most part, it worked well. The pieces lined up OK, and I didn’t get noticeable gaps. But when I was making my second board, about a quarter of the way in, something happened, and I started to get misalignment and gaps. The problem is that once these develop, I don’t think there is any good way to recover. So I ended up stopping that one and starting a new one. As a result, instead of getting one large rectangular board, I got two boards, one that is essentially square, and a smaller rectangular one.
On the larger (square-ish) board, I apparently screwed up the clamping a few “rows” from the end. I started getting gaps again, but there was nothing to be done but to press on. I found afterwards that the gaps were not too bad on one side (the top), but they are rather worse on the other (the bottom).
Each row took me about an hour of wait time, plus probably 15-30 minutes of gluing/clamping/cleaning. There were approximately 30 rows, so the gluing took me approximately 30-40 hours (although it seemed like a lot longer :-).
After the gluing was finally done, I had something that looked sort of like this:
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Which is to say, that it looked pretty hideous. I couldn’t help but think of this sort of like a pearl. When you first get it, the pearl is hidden inside of a yucky looking oyster, and until you open it, you really have no idea what you have.
On my first attempt, I flattened each face with a belt sander, and then smoothed it with a random-orbit sander. This took literally hours and hours. I found that end-grain cuts really slowly with sand paper (even with a coarse grit), and that with a belt sander, one can easily put gouges into a surface that took hours to remove with the random orbit sander.
I did it this way because it was too big to fit into my planer. However, I found to my chagrin that after I trimmed off the “points” on the sides, the width of the board was actually just a hair under 13 inches, so it would have fit in my planer.
When I made my second board, I trimmed off the sides first, and then used the planer to flatten the surfaces. Not only was this a lot faster and easier, but it also gave me a surface that wasn’t as dished as my belt sander work.
The only issue with using the planer is that it really blows out the trailing edge of the board. In this case it was OK because the trailing edge was made of large “triangles” that I had to trim off anyway.
It was after cleaning up the surface that I discovered that I had some gaps on one side of the board (the bottom when oriented as I was gluing it). At that point, I decided to make the board “one sided”, to route some finger grabs on the bottom, and to install rubber feet on the bottom. This means that you can only use one side of the board, but it also means that the side with the gaps will always be on the bottom and won’t be used.
When I was routing the finger pulls, I found that I was still getting some tear out despite making very light cuts. So I ended up clamping a sacrificial board to my router table fence, and then routing a hole through that board, to make a zero-clearance fence. That greatly reduced the tear-out on the edges.
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So here is what the boards looked like after all of the wood working and sanding. The Cherry and Walnut are very different looking, with sort of a speckled pattern on the Cherry.
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Here is what they looked like after applying mineral oil and bees’ wax. Now that speckled pattern is much more muted, and the Cherry and Walnut almost look identical in some light. The oil does make the colors “pop” however.
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If I were to do it again, I’m not sure if I would do it this way, or the stripe way. It is nice that there are no discontinuities on half of the rectangles, but the gaps I got were troubling. Despite how carefully I tried to clamp the pieces, eventually I would screw up. But since I don’t plan to make any more like this, the point is rather moot.
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