MantisBlog

In a stunning turn of events, Joey and Elina actually spent most of the day in the Caltech Student Shop constructing an end-grain hardwood cutting board. Obviously this must have happened because Elina was part of the project. Everyone knows Joey’s projects all end at the “purchase the raw materials” stage. Yay.

We started with a big 1.75-inch thick plank of alder and sawed/jointed/planed it down into 16 1.5×1.5×16″ pieces. We’ve now glued these together into four planks of four pieces each with the grain doing the best possible approximation of a laminated quartersawn board. As I write this, the glue is drying on those. Next, we’ll refinish those down to have flat edges and then cut them into 32 6×1.5×2″ strips which will be glued up into the final cutting board which will be 18″x15″x2″.

As I said, we’re using alder for the wood. Hard maple would undoubtedly have been better, but it costs almost twice as much. Alder is not particularly well-suited to this task, but it’s not terrible either, and it’s the cheapest hardwood I could find at Arroyo Hardwoods. We’re gluing it up with Elmer’s polyurethane glue which is a new process for me — I’ve only ever used yellow AR wood glues in the past. This is supposed to be waterproof and very strong, so we’ll see how it goes.

So far, the materials have cost about $60 for this, and we’ve put in about 5 hours in the shop. I imagine we’re about halfway done. We’ll probably have the whole thing assembled tomorrow, though there may be some finishing/surfacing work left to do.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 20th, 2006 at 5:24 pm and is filed under skank. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.