Insane Cutting Board Build || End Grain Cutting Board How To

This video was sponsored by Beard Club. I forgot there was two stools there. Hey, what's up? In this video, I'm going to show you how to make a cutting board. Now hold your horses, calm down. I know what you're thinking. A cutting board video? How boring. I gotta tell you, for the longest time I refused to make a cutting board, do a cutting board video. To be completely honest, I still haven't made a cutting board in my entire life. This video will be the first. The reason being is cutting boards. They're squares. They're boring. Who cares? Just glue some wood together and cut something on it. That was until I remembered back to my fifth grade art class. I thought you were going to do like the dream sequence thing and show me in fifth grade. All right, I'll just tell you. In fifth grade, I learned about tessellations. You know what a tessellation is? Most people don't. Tessellation is a pattern that perfectly interlocks and fits together. Now if you don't know what a tessellation is, you've probably seen them before somewhere out in the real world. A famous artist by the name of M.C. Escher made tessellations that were absolutely astounding. Let me show you some right here. See how it's a pattern? It's a shape, but it's perfectly cut out so it interlocks with itself. And it got me thinking. Could I do a tessellating pattern as a cutting board? I don't know. I know how to make tessellations with paper. I'm going to show you how to do that in just a second. But will it translate into wood? That's what this video is all about. Experimentation and seeing if we can make something. I don't know if this is going to work. This could be a terrible mistake. But follow along and let's find out together. Oh, and check the video description for links to products, Patreon, website, merchandise, all that stuff. New hats. Go get yourself one. Now let's try and make a tessellating cutting board. All right, so a tessellating pattern is a pattern that perfectly fits together. The simplest tessellating pattern is squares. You can nestle squares amongst each other so that it perfectly fits like a checkerboard or a tile floor. Something like that, as you can see. But we want to do a more complicated tessellating pattern. So if you take a simple square like this and you alter one side of it, okay? We cut out a crazy shape completely random and we cut that off of one side, okay? Now you have this shape that perfectly fits in there because we just cut it out. But if you take this shape and you put it on the other side like that, a bit on like that, then that will perfectly fit in that side. But you can take it a step further and you could cut something off of the bottom of this too. See that perfectly fits in there but then you can stick this up on the top up here. Now you have this crazy complex shape that is a tessellation which means that if we put it down on our paper like this and we trace it out, tessellation. Now I've done these a lot before with paper. I used to do them all the time in art class and you'd make a cool design and you draw out the pattern and then you try and find some cool animal within the shape and you'd give it eyes and wings and all that and you can make this really cool repeating pattern. But I've never done it out of wood. I've seen tessellations done out of wood before but they're always done with a CNC because you can get everything perfect and exact so that it nestles into itself. What I want to know is can we do a tessellating pattern for a cutting board without a CNC entirely by hand just with hand power tools no computers. Now I've done it with paper and paper is easy because when you cut the paper out you're not removing any material so when you take one side off and you stick it on the other side you know it's perfectly going to fit because no paper was actually removed. The problem is doing this with wood we have to remove some material because the saw blade is going to remove material whether that's a sixteenth of an inch for the bandsaw or an eighth of an inch for the table saw some material is going to be removed. So I would have to think that the piece isn't perfectly going to nest into itself if we cut it out with the bandsaw. Now the way to get around this obviously is to use a CNC machine and you set your offsets on one side and the other so you know that you account for that loss but I don't want to do it with a CNC so I think the best bet is to just go for it with the bandsaw that's the thinnest kerf blade that I have and hope that it fits together okay. I do have one solution if it doesn't fit together great but I'll get to that if we need it. So here we go having no clue whether or not this is even going to work I started drawing out some different shapes and trying to come up with a cool tessellating pattern. Now I decided to start simple because this is the first time I'm ever doing this and I don't want to go too crazy so I drew a simple arc on one side cut that piece out and then I used that piece to trace basically the same arc on the other side and I cut that piece out as well and doing the same thing I just showed you with that crazy shape I transitioned each one of those pieces to the opposite side. Now this should create a perfectly tessellating shape that will look somewhat like a scallop or a fish scale like that. Then to make sure it was a pattern that I actually liked I traced out my little paper template to kind of get an idea of what it would look like and it looked something like this dragon scales or fish scales or whatever you want to call this shape perfectly nesting into one another. I like this shape because it had soft curves which meant it should be a little easier to cut out on the bandsaw for my first attempt. Now that I had the shape the way I wanted it on a piece of paper I just need to duplicate that shape onto a piece of quarter inch plywood. So after drawing out my lines I took it over to the bandsaw and using a small eighth inch blade I cut out the shapes as smooth as I possibly could because this is going to be our final template. Then I switched those pieces around to the other side and I used some CA glue to glue them firmly in place. Now because this is going to be my router template I needed it to be as perfect as possible so I glued it up on my flat planer outfeed so that I could kind of move it around while the glue dried. This allowed me to press it firm against the outfeed so that I knew everything was flush and wiggling it around made sure I didn't accidentally glue it to my outfeed while the glue dried. And there you go the starts of my router template. Next I took this little template and I traced out a couple shapes on some more scrap quarter inch plywood. Then after rough cutting those pieces out on the bandsaw I stuck my original template to my new shapes with some double-sided tape and I took them over to the router table. Now I will admit this is a pretty small piece to be running through the router table by hand but I was able to hold it down pretty firm and I felt pretty comfortable with it. Here's a little foreshadowing for you this is going to come back to bite me in the butt later. But for the meantime I was able to cut out a bunch of shapes of scrap quarter inch plywood and what do you know they all fit together exactly like they should. So we're off to a good start. Now that I did some test pieces at a quarter inch ply it's time to actually cut them out of real wood. Now to glue up my cutting board I decided to use three different varieties of wood. Hard maple, black walnut, and bubinga to add a little pop of red. So after milling up all my boards I glued them up into some long chunks. I did this because I want the cutting board to be all end grain because that's a lot more work. So why not? I mean it is just a cutting board after all how long could it really take? The next day my glue was dry so I pulled all of my blanks out of clamps and I set to cleaning them up a little bit. I started out by running each piece on two sides through my joiner to get a nice flat square edge and then I finished them off on the alternate sides through my planer until they were all exactly the same size. Next I took them over to my chop saw and I set up this little jig so that I could make repeated cuts and get unified little slices of end grain off of each color. I started out doing a bunch of the black walnut until I got those all sliced up. Then I switched to the maple and I finished things off with that nice red bubinga. Now I had a bunch of uniform slices of end grain so all I really need to do is take my plywood templates and cut out all my shapes. That should be real simple, if only. Remember that foreshadowing comment? Using double-sided tape I stuck my template to the top of a piece. First I rough cut out the shape over on the band saw to remove material and then I went straight over to the router table to start cutting. And this is what happened. Yeah, I'll show you that in slow motion. I almost took off my flipping finger. See how it just tries to eat my hand alive? Perhaps these pieces are a little too small to send through the router table just holding them. Not to fear, I pulled out my handy dandy Rockler coping sled and I clamped the piece firmly in place. But with the added height of the coping sled, now my bit wasn't tall enough for that bearing to reach the template. So that wasn't gonna work. So I tried the old screw clamp trick, but because of the roundness of the shape it was hard to clamp it securely and eventually the vibration just wiggled it loose. Well, my worst fear has been realized. Now when I made these this small they were already kind of at the limit of what I'm comfortable running through by hand in the router table. Actually probably a little too small. But it worked with the plywood templates and I was hoping I could really hold on to this thing. The issue is normally you don't run wood oriented straight up through the router table. You run it through oriented the other way, horizontal. So I didn't know exactly what the router blade was gonna do to this wood. Now I was able to do one with the walnut, no problem. But walnut's a little bit softer. When it came to this hard maple it was just too hard and as you saw in the video it just ripped it out of my hands and honestly that was stupid. I shouldn't have been trying to run this tiny thing through the router table like that. It almost sucked my hand right into the blade. So can't do that anymore. I got out my coping sled thinking maybe I could clamp this into the coping sled and it would work that way. But these are too thick at this point and my blade's not long enough with the added thickness of the coping sled. So I tried the old wooden screw clamp trick where I just clamp it in the end of the wooden screw clamp and as you saw it just wiggled loose. That didn't work either. So I'm stuck. How the heck am I supposed to template route out these thick pieces when I can't hold them by hand? I can't get them in any good clamping system. What do I do? I don't know. I have one last Hail Mary attempt and that is to somehow affix these securely to a flat surface and then use my handheld router with this pattern bit where the bearing's up towards the shaft. That way I can come down from the top, meet that template that's sitting on the top. Now this won't go all the way through my piece. It'll only get me about halfway there but it will get me enough that then I should be able to take this and stick it in the coping sled and finish it off. Now that stinks because it means I'm going to have to route every single one of these twice which this was already going to take a really long time and I don't even know if this is going to work. But I'm all about trying to make this thing happen one way or another. So I'm going to somehow attach this down, try and do it by hand with this beefy router and see where that gets me. Wish me luck. Well hello there. This video is proudly sponsored by Beard Club. Now I know lots of you guys have commented on how amazing and wonderful and luscious and thick my beard looks and although I'd like to take all the credit for that myself, you know, good genetics, I actually do a little bit more to it to keep it looking this nice and fresh and clean and that's where Beard Club comes in. They have all the products you need to grow and maintain a nice thick looking beard. Products like their beard and scruff cream. You ever shave your beard a little close and then it gets itchy? Well lots of times that's because your skin needs a little something too so their beard and scruff cream is great because not only is it good for your beard, it's good for the skin underneath. Keeps it, you know, itch free. One of my favorite products is their beard balm. 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If this doesn't work I'm out of ideas. Now I can't just take that giant router and route this little piece. I need some sort of support. So using double-sided tape I taped a bunch of blocks kind of in a perimeter around the outside of where I'll set my piece. Then to get them to the same height I took all those test pieces. I cut out a quarter inch plywood and I taped those to the top of the block. Then using double-sided tape I taped the piece that I actually want to cut in the very center. Then I could use the router and rest it on all those blocks on the outside so it's nice and supported. And look at that. Chimidean sausages and scrambled eggs. It actually worked. Now as you can see it didn't cut all the way through but that's fine because now I have a new template. The actual block itself. So I can take the entire piece over stick it in that rock alert coping sled and safely run the rest of it through the router table. And it cuts smooth as butter one piece down. I might actually be able to make this happen. The problem is it takes about five minutes to do a single piece because I have to rough cut it on the bandsaw, stick it down to my little jig, cut it out with the hand router, then stick it back in the coping sled and go over and finish it off on the router table. Five minutes might not seem like a long time but when I have to do 50 or 60 pieces five minutes each that starts to add up. But if it was quick everybody would be doing it I guess. So I just got in a little groove and started routing out piece after piece after piece. I had no clue how big of a cutting board I was trying to make. My plan was just to route all of my pieces and see where that got me. After I got all my shapes cut out I marked the top of each one because they did need to be oriented in a certain direction so that they all fit together appropriately. So I just did a little pencil scribble to make sure they all stayed oriented in the right direction. And I started piecing them together. And they fit together fairly well. But remember I removed that material with the bandsaw blade. So even though they fit together fairly well they didn't fit together perfectly. And this is where I freaked myself out and decided that if I just glued them up like this it wasn't going to look good. So enter plan B. My idea was to add a rabbit to the outside edge of every single piece so that when I pushed them together it would create a little channel in between each piece that I could pour epoxy in. Yeah I know, epoxy. Barf. But the nice thing about this is the epoxy would cover up any inconsistencies or flaws in my seams so it would give a perfect look to the entire cutting board. Now I didn't know if this was necessary so I decided to only do this on one side because this is an experimental project after all. On one side we'll do the epoxy on the other side we'll just glue it up and see if I needed to do this step at all. So I set to work with an eighth inch rabbeting bit. Now because these pieces are small and I wanted a consistent cut I used double-sided tape to stick each piece to my workbench. That way it was nice and secure and I could just zip around it with the little trim router. As you can see it carves out that little rabbit that will eventually become the channel to hold the epoxy. You can see it better here as I start to put all the pieces together. With all my rabbits cut on one side I could start to lay out all the pieces how I wanted the cutting board to come together and I came up with this shape. Now I need to make it more square to make it easier to clamp up so I'm going to take all these pieces on one side cut them in half and move them to the other side. So I just took all the pieces from one side went over to the bandsaw and just eyeballed it. Now I know this isn't going to give me a perfect cut but it should get me close enough to clamp this thing up and then I'll square everything off after the glue dries. So I stuck all my half pieces on either side and then I had to do the same thing to the bottom row but because this is a YouTube video I'll just make it magically happen right now. Boom, cut in half. So I transferred all those half pieces from the bottom up to the top and now we have a much more rectangular looking board. Now we just got to figure out how in the world we're going to clamp this thing together. That should be just so much fun. In an effort to make the clamping process as easy and stress-free as possible I made this little clamping jig. I affixed two sides at a perfect 90 degree angle that will stay put. I covered them in tuck tape so the glue wouldn't stick to it and then I'll just clamp on the remaining two pieces and hopefully be able to squeeze everything together nice and tight. So I started spreading glue on each and every piece. I decided to use Titebond 3 because after doing a little research that's better for cutting boards because of its waterproof nature and I really lubed these things up with glue because I knew there was a few little gaps here and there and then very slowly I added pressure on the top and the sides until everything was squeezed pretty tight. Because my sides weren't perfectly square there were a few gaps here or there so I just used some shims and shoved them in those gaps to make sure there was even pressure around the entire outside of the piece. Then I broke off the shims and I let the cutting board sit for a couple of hours. Once the glue was all set up I removed my clamps and I pried the cutting board free from the clamping jig and it seemed to be all held together nice and secure. Then I took the entire thing over to my drum sander and I sent it through on both sides to make sure everything was nice and even and there wasn't any bow or warp to the board itself. Next I needed to square the entire board up so I used the track saw to cut a perfectly straight line on one side and then using my track saw squaring guide thing from woodpeckers I cut a square edge on the other side. Then with two square edges I could run the remaining two sides through on the table saw to get a perfect rectangle. I tried to do all these cuts even so that I had the same amount cut off on both sides so that the pattern maintained as best it could. Then I wanted to give the board a little more shape so I rounded over each corner using this little rounding router jig thingy-ma-bob. Now I thought it might look funny if the epoxy just stopped abruptly on the border of each one of those shapes so my solution was to do a rabbet around the entire outside of the board and this would create kind of an epoxy border around the entire thing. So after cutting the rabbet I cleaned up that edge just with a little bit of sandpaper and I was ready to prep this thing for my epoxy pour. I just decided to use some more tuck tape to create a dam around the outside of the entire board that way I can pour my epoxy on the top and hopefully it won't leak all over my table. At least this is good in theory. This weak flimsy tape border is gonna come back to hurt me. Then I reached for some Total Boat high-performance epoxy with the fast cure hardener. I mixed up the two parts and I added some black pigment. I didn't know what color to do. In hindsight maybe I should have done a contrasting color like white or pink but that just seemed a little too crazy. You can't go wrong with black, right? After mixing my epoxy thoroughly I started pouring it in every little crack and crevice. I got to admit I don't love pouring epoxy but it was pretty satisfying to fill up all these little rabbeted out channels. After making sure every channel was nice and full of black epoxy I pulled out my butane torch and I hit the entire surface just to pull out any air bubbles that might be lurking beneath the surface. And now it was just time to wait for this epoxy to cure up. Hopefully this works. The next morning I came out and removed all of my tuck tape and freed the cutting board from its tapey grasp. That sounded really dramatic. Then I sent the entire thing back through the drum sander and I have to admit it looks pretty darn sharp with that epoxy border around each and every shape. But you know the funny thing is the bottom side looked absolutely perfect too. So I never even needed that epoxy to begin with. It would have been fine. I should have I cleaned up all the edges with the sander but we had a little issue. My epoxy border, the tape infringed on the outline just a little bit and did not look good. But when in doubt route it out. That's what I always say. So I still had that rabbeting bit chucked up in my router and I just re-rabbeted the entire outside to remove that epoxy border and add a nice little step down detail on the top of the cutting board. If you didn't watch the video you never would have known that that epoxy was there to begin with. Then I just cleaned everything up with a little sandpaper to knock down those edges and I flipped over the cutting board and added a slight round over to the bottom just so it wasn't a sharp edge. And finally it was time to do my all-time favorite thing and that was finish sand. Luckily this wasn't too bad because it was pretty good coming out of the drum sander. And with that there was only one thing left to do and that was to rub oil on this guy. By this guy I mean rub oil on the cutting board not this guy as in this guy like me. I'm not I'm not asking you to rub oil on me. You guys understand that I'm talking about the cutting board here right? I mean I wouldn't be opposed to a little oil but anyways I'm getting off subject. For oil I just used mineral oil because it's food safe. It looked great and made those colors pop out. I gotta tell you I was really torn between whether or not I liked the epoxy side better or the natural side. What do you guys think? I mean they both came together perfect. Hey I actually did it. I know that was a crazy process to get to one single cutting board but it was just an idea and an experimentation to see if we could make it happen and I did it. The cool thing is now that I did kind of this simpler tessellation I could do this same process with like a pretty crazy tessellation now that I know I could do it. The one thing I might change is just to thin down the cutting board a little bit so I could do it all on the coping sled and not have to do the two steps of routing because that would have saved a lot of time and the epoxy actually turned out pretty cool but in the end I really didn't need it because it glued up great even with cutting it on the bandsaw. So it just goes to show you can make a tessellating cutting board without a cnc completely by hand and you know it doesn't look half bad. So hopefully you enjoyed this video. Make sure you check out the link in the video description for all the tools and products that I used to make this thing. There's also a link down there to our Patreon account. If you're interested in that you get behind the scenes footage and live question and answer every Monday morning. You get coupon codes to the website. You're the first people that get to watch the videos ad free. You know about new merchandise before it hits the website. All that stuff. So anyways check that out. I'm gonna go chop up some vegetables and really scratch this thing up.