| Blog series by Gary Fixler | updated 1150 days ago | 4 parts | 18476 reads | 29 comments total |
Part 1: visualizing a cutting board in SketchUp
I got some good suggestions in my last post about what to do with this block that I glued up from mostly reclaimed red oak pallet wood: One of the ideas I liked best was an end grain cutting board. I realized I had pics of each side of the block, so I made a block in SketchUp of the same dimensions, then slapped on textures from those pictures. It looked like this: Now I could cut that up by drawing lines at the locations where I wanted the cuts, then using the push/pull tool t...
Part 2: cuts and glue-ups
I’ve renamed my 5 preexisting project series from “project: whatever” to “00n: whatever” where n is the number of the set of posts in order. E.g. instead of “project: a rolling base for my planer,” that was the second project series I made, so now it’s “002: a rolling base for my planer.” The projects were starting to scatter in my series list, and I’d have a few series listed at the top in the drop-down for new posts, then an ...
Part 3: cleaned up, ready for final shaping and finishing
Well, it’s a lot nicer than it was where I left off yesterday. The router bridge (seen at the end of this post) is such a nice way to plane things, and I’ve thought of some ideas that might make setup a lot easier. I’ve moved up to a 5/8” or maybe 3/4” bit and it makes planing a lot faster. Too, I found that just putting masking tape along the bottom edges, curved to stick to the workbench is more than adequate as a hold down until I come up with a better solu...
Part 4: rounding over, sanding, and finishing
I decided it would probably be boring to show each step from the previous ‘milling everything flat and square’ post, to the final board, so here’s the final board, all finished: It is 6-3/4”x8-5/8” and a little over 1.75” thick. Or, you know, about the size of the US hardcover edition of “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,” though the book is a little less than an inch taller in the longest dimension. Note the butcher’s block c...
