4peakswoodworks: Ben & Kristen's cutting board

I finally started working on my brother-in-laws wedding present today. He requested a custom made cutting board from my wife and she said, “where the heck am I going to get that.” To which he replied, “Anthony, duh.” It took Laura a couple of seconds to realize what he was talking about and said, “Oooooooh!”. This is funny because that’s one of the gifts she got for Christmas.

Laura's maple and padauk cutting board

I have made a rendering of what I want the cutting board to look like.

First I start by by modeling a single block on my cad system. I change the shading to the type of wood that I want it to resemble.

Then I save a new file as a new name and change the shading again to resemble the other wood that I will be using.

Now for the cool part, I start a new file as an assembly and insert both blocks, add a few mates and you start to have a cool looking strip of wood. Once this is done I save a new assembly, create a few more mates and do a liner pattern. The end result is what you see above.

This is the lumber that I started with. It is 8/4 hard maple and 8/4 walnut. This lumber is just under 6 inches wide. I forgot to take pictures before I cut the boards to 21 in long I believe the rough lumber was about 6 to 8 feet long.

This is a view from the end of the rough lumber. The one piece of walnut you can see a crack. I plan on using some epoxy to stabilize the wood.

I already trued up the lumber in the jointer and now I am running it through the planner. When I plane my lumber to thickness. I find using calipers much easier to make sure it is the correct thickness.