Hello All,
I somehow missed the obligatory making of cutting boards previously in my woodworking exploits, so I decided that now was the time. I wanted to make a gift for my daughter and her husband, and had a request from my wife (gotta pay attention to those!), so off I went. This was also a good time to show some appreciation to my awesome neighbors, so I ended up building 6 boards in all. I used the 2 designs in the photos made from walnut, hard maple, alder, and sapele. I won’t elaborate on these unless asked since you all have probably seen similar boards before. I will say that between the inlays, handles, and juice grooves I learned some worthwhile skills to use in the future.
I wanted something more than just a cutting board for my daughter, so I made a matching set of coasters with a holder. The holder was the most elaborate part of the build, because I wanted to use a small walnut cutoff from a previous project with nice grain that was not quite big enough for the 4” coasters. Since I didn’t want to reduce the size of the coasters, I added a maple accent on each corner to give me the length I needed. I ended up liking this better than a plain beveled corner because of the nice contrast. I routed grooves in each piece of maple, as well as the ends of the walnut panels, and added a spline for strength. The openings in the holder were cut roughly on the table saw, and then cleaned up using a simple MDF router guide with a flush trim bit.
Thanks for viewing!
Tim