Today I'm going to take you through step by step and cover everything you need to know about making this beautiful walnut cutting board. Hey everyone my name is Tim and welcome back to another episode of Casual Builds. The channel focused on bringing you beginner DIY and woodworking content. Now before we get started with today's build there are a few things that you should know about cutting boards.
The first thing that you're going to want to know is what type of wood to use with your cutting board. In my case I'm going to be using this walnut. Some other options are maple, cherry.
Basically, it just needs to be a hardwood with a nice tight grain pattern. And then also you got to decide what type of cutting board are you gonna make. Are you gonna make a face grain cutting board?
Is it gonna be an edge grain or end grain? And I can quickly explain the differences between all three of those. A face grain cutting board is when the face of the board is on top.
Some of the pros are that the face is typically the most decorative part of the board, so it will look nice. And these can be fairly easy to make if you're working with lumber that's all the same width. On the other hand, the face will definitely show your knife marks more easily than an edge or end grain board would. Also, there's not a lot of give, so it can dull your knives fairly quickly. An edge grain cutting board is when the edge of the board is facing up.
This is what I'm talking about. what we'll be making today and some of the advantages of an edge grain cutting board are that they're sturdy and less likely to warp. Also unlike face grain boards you can control the width of the overall board as well. Some cons are that they will still show knife marks and they can dull your knives over time as well. And lastly an end grain cutting board is when you cross cut an edge grain cutting board and align it so the end of the board is facing up.
End grain boards are the best for your knife and are less likely to show as many knife marks compared to the edge grain cutting boards. to an edge or face grain board. However some of the cons are that they take a while to make because sanding end grain takes forever and they can split or crack if not glued up properly.
So to start we're going to take this piece of walnut and we're going to chop it up at the miter saw. I'll probably go somewhere between like 15 and 16 inches or so. Not entirely sure yet but once we have those pieces we're going to clean up each one of the edges over with my jointer jig at the table saw.
Rip them into strips and then we'll probably send them through the planer. Now that I have one edge on each one of these boards all cleaned up, I'm going to take that edge and reference it against the fence on my table saw and then start cutting these into strips. So the width of each one of these strips is going to represent the overall height of the cutting board when it's completed. I'm going for an inch and three quarters knowing that I'm going to take it to the planer later on and that will remove some of the thickness as well.
So let's go ahead take some of these boards over and start ripping them down to some smaller pieces. So I was really hoping that all of these boards would be flat enough that I could just glue them together and be done with it but as I'm arranging them there's a lot of different gaps in here and I want to take care of those now because if I just force it together with glue and clamps I'm assuming that there's gonna be issues down the road it might come apart it might split so definitely don't want to do that we're gonna take out the jointer run them all through and then run them through the planer and then they should be all set for glue up. All right, so the planer and the jointer worked these boards are nice and flat for the glue I'm gonna be using Type-on 3 it's waterproof.
I've never had any issues with this. So that's what we use And then for clamping you just want to make sure that you're putting an equal Clamping pressure all the way through and just enough glue that you can see the squeeze out coming from the top and the bottom I'm gonna put two clamps on the bottom two clamps on the top You don't want to over tighten it You just want to make sure that it's tight just enough to get that glue squeeze out or else you might Kind of end up with a warp in your board later on. We don't want that. So let's go ahead and Glue this baby up It's a little bit later in the day and I am gonna wait until tomorrow morning before I unclamp this and put it through the planter but I was just so excited to come down here and take a look to see what it looks like and it looks great so see you tomorrow all right so this thing is looking pretty sweet off the planer there are a few things that we need to do next and the first one being taking this over to the table saw and cleaning up the edges I'll use my crosscut jig for that after that we're gonna bring it over to the CNC and engrave it per the clients request And then once that is done, we'll add a chamfer along all of the sides just to clean up any of the sharp edges.
All right, now we're on to sanding. I'm going to start off with 120 grit, working my way up to 220 grit. When I'm done with that, I'm going to spray this entire thing down with water to raise those little grain fiber, little wood fiber things, so I can sand it down again.
That way, it's going to get super smooth and you won't be in for a nice surprise the first time you go and wash this thing. So that part is super important. Spray it down, sand again. Just remember that.
I almost forgot. I need a, uh... You know. So it's been about 45 minutes and this thing is still pretty wet so I'm going to let it dry overnight and then tomorrow we can come back and sand it again up to 220 grit and then add the finish. Thank you.
All right it's time to put some finish on this thing. I'm going to be using mineral oil. This little bottle is made by Howard. I'll leave a link to this as well as all the other tools that I used during this video down in the description below if you're interested. It says to season a new board to do at least three to four coats so you put a coat on you wait 20 minutes you wipe off the excess rinse and repeat and i like to just finish things off by using this other conditioner it's got mineral oil plus some waxes i'll do this one last also if you're making this as a gift for someone highly recommend telling them to pick up a bottle of this as well because typically wood cutting boards will kind of dry up over time and when you start to see that happening you just put a coat of this on and it just rejuvenates it also if you found this video helpful and you would like to support my channel all you got to do is hit that thumbs up button subscribe if you are not already to stay up to date with my latest beginner woodworking videos now let's go ahead and put the finish on and watch this walnut come to life