Let the glue dry over night and then run the glued up blank through the planer on both sides until you have a flat smooth surface to begin cutting the strips for your end grain cutting board.ģ. These faces will be planed later so smearing the glue is not an issue. The small oak strips on each end of the glue up help protect the edges of the walnut so you won’t have to sand the cutting board more than you need.īefore putting the top clamp on wipe up the excess glue on the top and bottom of the board with a wet rag. Squiggly lines is a technical term 🙂 When you clamp the boards together you want to see small beads of glue rise up between the joints. Spread the glue from the squiggly lines evenly before clamping. Then glue the boards together using parallel clamps and a water resistant wood glue. Joint the edges to make sure you have clean edges ready for glue up (If you don’t have a jointer you can also use a tablesaw). Glue Up the End Grain Cutting Board Blank You can come up with a ton of awesome designs so move your boards around until you get the end grain cutting patterns you like. The triangle the sapwood made was perfect and you’ll see what it turns into later. I lined the grain direction of the outer boards up with the grain direction of the inner boards so it almost looks like they are just one larger board. I arranged the boards as you can see above so it resembled a mirror image from the center. In walnut the heartwood is dark and the sapwood is light which makes for a great contrast on your end grain cutting board designs. This is the wood that is closest to the bark and carries the sap. The lighter streaks you see are what’s call the sapwood. Looking at the end grain, I could see these would make an amazing end grain cutting board. I had a 6′ long piece of walnut that was about 2-1/2″ wide and I cut it into 16″ pieces that were 1-1/4″ thick. For making end grain cutting boards the grain pattern on the ends of the boards is what will be showing when it’s done. The first and probably most important part of making a cutting board is the wood selection.

Select your Wood for the End Grain Cutting Board Final glue up of the end grain cutting boardġ.Cut the strips for the final cutting board design.

3d blocks cutting board plans