Making an End Grain Cutting Board

I've seen these around a lot lately, and now that my big bookshelf is finally done, I wanted to try my hand at making my own end grain cutting board. Another full disclosure for everyone, I planning on making a lot of these and hopefully, selling a lot too! These are fun to make, they are relatively easy, but the possibilities are endless. Size, grain, stain, patterns, you can pretty much do anything you want with one of these. The hardest part is waiting for the wood glue to dry (like I am now). But don't worry, I'm going to go pick up some more wood soon to start another one haha! 

You can see in my pictures above, I kept everything pretty symmetric, with the two outer pieces being the same size, and the inner pieces being the same size. I think my next one will be more varying in sizes, that way you end up with all sorts of patterns and designs in the finished product. So yesterday I picked out my pieces, laid out the pattern I wanted and glued everything together to sit over night. 

I know it looks a little hectic, but trust me, it works! So I let that sit last night, and today I used my table saw to square up all of the edges, then I did a bit of sanding. Now in retrospect, I don't think I'm going to do sanding again, because after I sanded and cut my individual squares out, I realized I had to square up each individual piece. Why did I have to do that? Because when you sand something, you inevitably make the surface just a little bit uneven. The end result is that the surfaces would ultimately be glued together where a little off. And having to square up each individual piece again was a pain! So there's another lesson learned from Nick!

Now because I had to square each block of wood up (some of them still aren't perfectly square) each block is just a little bit different in size. But again, that's the cool thing about cutting boards like this, the chaotic pattern can add to the beauty of the piece. Take a look at them glued together and tell me what you think. Later on today, after the glue has had a while to dry, I'll go back out and work on it some more. I'm hoping to get this process down to just a couple of days in total. 

 

I can already see it in my head, and trust me. It's going to look awesome! Let me know what you think, and look for more from my wood shop (aka garage).