First Attempt At Tumbling Blocks!

I’ve always thought that this was a cool pattern and I finally got to try it. For a first attempt at such a challenging pattern I’m pretty impressed with the results. It is made from end grain maple, oak, and poplar sanded to 1000 grit and finished with danish oil. The biggest challenge was getting the saw set perfectly to 30 degrees as being slightly off would leave a lot of gaps. I used a Wixey angle gauge to set the blade and I got it really good. I then ripped three strips of each type of wood and glued them up into a log which looked like a really long hexagon. The log was then cut in 5/8 of an inch segments which would be the thickness of the cutting board. I made sure that I carefully set up a stop on the chop saw to get every piece the exact same size to reduce the amount of levelling later. Glue up was the next step and the part that you have to be most carefull. I carefully worked through it to get it as gap free as possible but still got small gaps but they were easy to fix. After the glue cured I started levelling it with a belt sander. Luckily there wasn’t that much levelling to do since I got the glue up really good. It was then sanded to 1000 grit and given a couple coats of danish oil and it’s looking good!

-- Remember, measure twice, cut once