End grain cutting board all Neanderthal?

[Mike Cherry]

One of the projects I wanted to build when I first started woodworking. After I found out how hard it is to plane end grain, I have neglected it. Anyone have tips for doing this? I imagine the more you can do to get your pieces cut accurately, the better. What's the best way to flatten the board? Maybe a toothed blade in a low angle plane?

[Mike Null]

Don't tell anybody but I use a RO sander.

[David Turner]

Mike:

I make end grain hard maple cutting boards regularly as the scraps seem to grow in the wood pile. I have never been able to glue up a board that was close to being level on the top so I just gave up on that goal. I now take it/them to the local cabinet shop that has a big thickness sander (I take a number of cutting boards at a time as the minimum charge is $20).

Last group I made I took to a friends shop that has a thickness planer with a carbide insert head. Escapes me at the moment as to what they are called. It did a really nice job!

David Turner
Plymouth, MI.

[Pat Barry]

I think there is a reason that you won't find any old end grain cutting boards. Too much work for hand tools. If you insist, then I think its important to pick a wood that will behave for you (maple , cherry, walnut). Get a nice low angle plane. Work from the outside toward the middle from all directions. Be prepared for a lot of blood sweat and tears.

[Robert Engel]

What ^Pat said.
It will be a workout but if you keep the shavings thin that will help.

[Warren Mickley]

I think that if you are having trouble planing end grain something is wrong with your plane. Not sharp, too heavy a cut, dinky block plane or something.

What is a lot of work is gluing a bunch of pieces together to make an end grain board. I can't imagine anyone doing that before the machine age. It is not like a single board will not hold up to everyday use. I have a hickory cutting board that has been in constant use since 1973 and my son has a white oak board that had been in constant use since about 1965.

[Mike Cherry]

So, in a nut shell. It can be done, but probably shouldn't.
Warren, I wasn't sure if your comment about sharpness was aimed at me or the task of planing an end grain cutting board in general. Either way, I have no doubt my blades would cut the end grain. I just wasn't sure if such a feat should even be attempted.

Pat, you mentioned that you don't see old cutting boards in this style. That's all I really needed to hear.

So my next question would be if you were going to build an end grain cutting board, what type of material would you use and how would you build it only using handtools? Breadboard ends? Some kind of miter trim?

[Mark AJ Allen]

I made one by hand only and yes it was pretty time consuming. I choose to not assemble and glue up the whole thing in one time at the end; I would just glue one block on at a time, resulting in one 'strip' of the cutting board; I used all kinds of different woods in the project. After each individual block was dried to the strip, I would use my shooting board and plane to make the strip square. I still needed to even our the top and bottom after all the strips were assembled to the final board, but I think it was much easier than if I hadn't leveled the strips.

[Jim Koepke]

So my next question would be if you were going to build an end grain cutting board, what type of material would you use and how would you build it only using handtools?

Many years ago free standing butcher blocks were made from bundles of wood. The cutting surface was the end grain of the bundle.

It probably wasn't until there was a nontoxic water resistant glue available that end grain cutting boards were made for home use.

I like maple. Any wood to be used with food should be checked for toxicity. There are a few sites on the internet that list this by species.

My method would be to edge glue pieces together to make a panel. Start with pieces the same thickness to make it easy to flatten the faces. Then I would shoot the end grain and crosscut off a piece a bit thicker than you want the board's finished size. Shoot the main stock again. Also carefully clean the face of the cut piece. Repeat this until enough stock is cut to make your cutting board. It is possible to make patterns with this method.

Google > cutting board patterns < to find a lot of examples.

jtk

[Mike Cherry]

Thanks for the replies guys. I misspoke in my earlier question. If you were to build a cutting board how would you do it. Not an end grain board. Just a regular old board.

[Tom Vanzant]

Mike, I make kitchen-size (8"x14"x7/8") cutting boards from maple. I rip to 15/16", turn the strips on edge, arranged for appearance and grain direction, then glue with Titebond III. I leave the clamps on overnight, then let the board "season" for a couple of days. I flatten and thickness with handplanes, nip the corners at 45*x1", and break edges about 1/16". Finish is mineral oil.

[Mike Cherry]

Thanks Tom, any chance you got a picture of one?

[Tom Vanzant]

No pix and no boards either.

[Karl Andersson]

Mike,
I made half a dozen smaller cutting boards (cutting surface is 9" square) for Christmas gifts last year, based on one I made for my wife. All were made from 5/4 hard maple, plain sawn and planed down to a full 1" thick. The handles are all different shapes and decorative styles and are about 3/4 " thick to make them easier to grasp. The boards all had a slight cup to them on one side from the kiln drying - after planing, I scraped them from the center out to dish them about 1/32 in the center to keep them from spinning during use. Finish was food-grade flax oil to add some amber color, followed by Watco "salad bowl finish" which is a bit too glossy for my taste, but it holds up well to washing and keeps food from sticking, plus some were painted and it helps protect the paint. I'll see if I can find pictures of that group, but here is the original one. This one is 4 years old and sees daily use; it has held up well to the knives and I just wipe it down in the worn areas with flax oil about twice a year. Maple end grain cuts easily with sharp tools - I used a spokeshave for the curved areas, a Stanley #3 for the straights, and a chip carving knife for the really tight areas, all followed by a fresh scraper appropriately curved. The only caution I'd give is that these are pretty heavy, so a larger one might need two hands or be a bit thinner.
Karl
324834324832324833

[Mike Cherry]

That's awesome Karl, thanks for the pics!

[Brian Holcombe]

I use a softwood cutting board, and I see that Sitka spruce is regularly recommended for cutting boards (not end grain, but face grain).

The cutting board is much harder on the knife than the food is (unless you hit a bone or pit), so whatever you can do to minimize that will have your knives last longer between sharpening.

[Stanley Covington]

Try a low angle jack plane, with the mouth set wide, a cambered blade, and skew it to the direction of travel. Commit the weight of your whole body into each stroke, and be relentless (no hesitation). I find it helps to listen to heavy metal music.

[Allen Jordan]

I used planes to flatten this end grain cutting board:

324865

You can see the flattening in progress here:

324867

Initially after glue-up, I used a coarse wood-bodied plane to remove the dried squeeze out. Then I used my LV LA jack plane with the 25 degree blade, freshly sharpened and set pretty lightly. I also beveled all the edges with a block plane ahead of time to prevent grain blow-out. Planing at a skew helped. Took a long time, but worked eventually. I did hit it with a ROS after to make it absorb finish better.

[Mike Cherry]

Try a low angle jack plane, with the mouth set wide, a cambered blade, and skew it to the direction of travel. Commit the weight of your whole body into each stroke, and be relentless (no hesitation). I find it helps to listen to heavy metal music.
Call me crazy, but this seems like a good excuse to dial up Metallica on Spotify!!

[Mike Cherry]

I used planes to flatten this end grain cutting board:

324865

You can see the flattening in progress here:

324867

Initially after glue-up, I used a coarse wood-bodied plane to remove the dried squeeze out. Then I used my LV LA jack plane with the 25 degree blade, freshly sharpened and set pretty lightly. I also beveled all the edges with a block plane ahead of time to prevent grain blow-out. Planing at a skew helped. Took a long time, but worked eventually. I did hit it with a ROS after to make it absorb finish better.

Before you posted I was fairly convinced this was a bad idea. I think I might just give it a go. What kinda wood is this? Looks like maple and mahogany?

[Stan Calow]

For cutting boards that will actually be used for cutting, I've used wide solid maple pieces. You can get a stack of wide "shorts" of birdseye or curly maple from some lumberyards, that are big enough, and pretty enough without having to glue up smaller pieces. My experience with cutting boards is that sooner or later, regardless of what you tell people, they'll go in the dishwasher, ruining the glue up.

[Ryan Mooney]

I'm quite sure this was done in the past, based on some of the antique butchers blocks I've seen floating around. Whether or not anyone enjoyed the process and how often is another question altogether. I've seen two styles of thick antique butcher blocks, the "round off of a tree" and the "large number of boards fastened together". The latter appears to be a somewhat more recent invention from around the 1880s or so. Although I haven't found a good base source for the earliest ones, it still shows up as a relatively recent innovation circa 1912

https://books.google.com/books?id=7QQ3AQAAMAAJ&lpg=PA116&ots=0WmwBI4Vm2&dq=The%20Sanitary%20Meat%20Block&pg=PA116#v=onepage&q=The%20Sanitary%20Meat%20Block&f=false

The comment about finishing the blocks on a lathe is interesting, but I believe that was in reference to making them round, not finishing the tops. The sycamore references for the older tree-round style blocks is also interesting..

I think the round block one we had when I was a kid was ?fir? there wasn't much else that grew around there except cotton wood which would at first blush seem to be a bit fuzzy. A few years back I made one out of black locust which survived ~4 years without splitting (last time I looked - its at a friends house I haven't been to in a couple of years), it was actually clean enough from the chainsaw we just used it as it was (it was being used for backyard chicken chopping).

I also found a Canadian patent from 1906 for the dovetail variety (https://books.google.com/books?id=gsNQAAAAYAAJ&lpg=PA1584&ots=C8Sb2u7iId&dq=dovetail%20butcher%20block&pg=PA1584#v=onepage&q=dovetail%20butcher%20block&f=false), although it may have been used somewhat before that I'm dubious that those were extensively hand cut so they were likely also machine surfaced in at least some cases.

There appear to be a decent number of patents for re-surfacing machines like: https://www.google.com/patents/US1205322 and https://www.google.com/patents/US1899204 among others so it seems there was at least some demand for alternatives.

Stanley did make a plane purported to be especially for this purpose: http://www.supertool.com/StanleyBG/stan9.htm#num64 - basically a long body low angle plane, whether they sold very many is another question as the plane seems to be quite the rarity and commands a commensurate price (http://www.handplane.com/55/stanley-no-64-butchers-block-plane/ - something to add to the elusive search for rare planes to fund the purchase of useful ones I suppose).

Its also worth noting that most of the surviving butcher blocks have a 2-4" hollow in the middle from being scraped and cleaned over the years, so flattening then wasn't an ongoing process and likely they weren't perfectly flat to begin with. Its entirely possible that most were cut and then scraped "clean" using some sort of scraper (there are a number of patents for butcher block scrapers as well - mostly for cleaning as best as I can tell but maybe they were used for initial conditioning as well?).

This topic has (somewhat unsurprisingly I suppose) been covered here a couple of times before:
http://www.sawmillcreek.org/showthread.php?194209-Advice-on-planing-end-grain-butcher-block
http://www.sawmillcreek.org/showthread.php?81001-Question-Handplaning-end-grain

So I'd encourage you to go for it with a nice sharp blade, maybe using a toothing plane to get it flat first and then a low angle smoother to finish it off and report back on how it all went for those of us not quite motivated enough to try it ourselves :D

[Mike Cherry]

Ryan that's quite the reply you have left us. Maybe more background on this project from a handtool perspective than the whole thread combined. I suppose I now need to buy a toothed blade. I'm gonna have to finally choose between my LN low angle jack and my LV low angle jack. I need to sell one or the other....

[Ryan Mooney]

I was curious about the history because of the old blocks I'd seen which made me wonder.. how did they do that? :D

I started thinking about this a couple years back when a friend bought one of the dovetailed variety and wanted to use it more as decor than functional which required flattening the top (it had the common ~3"+ dip in the center). In the end I told her to build a router sled (yeah I know wrong forum, but seriously - taking off 3" of end grain hard maple looked... hard) and then she hired someone to do it. I don't know what they did, it came back flat anyway. I suspect not a drum or belt sander both because it was a solid ~2'+ thick even once the top was taken down so it would have had to have been a serious machine and because of the rather hilarious story I found about how well that doesn't work with all the old fat in them. You can find the story with the google search "site:forums.finewoodworking.com old butcher block belt sander smoke"

I'd probably try it without the toothed blade see how it goes before spending the money, the worst is you loose an hour or so to some exercise. Sharpen up extra sharp, set the blade super close, wax the sole, and have to (and bevel the edges). Having said that you may well be happier with one if you're doing any number of them, but I'd still say try it first just to see..

[Mike Cherry]

Yea that's a good call. As an aside, I can keep putting off my decision about which low angle Jack I want to keep lol

[Brian Holcombe]

I have a toothed blade that can go for sale, for LN. I don't use it.

That being said I don't think it's useful for this project, a very sharp blade will do fine. Take light cuts and chamfer the outside edges of the board to prevent chip out.