I’d been toying with the idea of trying an end grain cutting board for quite some time. Years, in fact – since before I started making any cutting boards at all. My first inquiries online brought me quickly to this article on The Wood Whisperer website, “How to Make a Butcher Block End Grain Cutting Board” containing what has come to be called, since its first appearance in 2006, “the video that launched a thousand cutting boards”.
What held me back for so long was my concern about how to thickness the cutting board. The preferred method seemed to be to use a drum sander (thickness sander), which I do not have, and do not have room for. The less problematic edge grain cutting boards I went on to build (like these or like these) were fine to run through the planer, but end grain boards and thickness planers are not a good mix (see this cautionary article and pretty convincing anecdotal evidence).
So of the alternative approaches I could take, including hand planes and router jigs, I opted for a belt sander. (Reasonable cash outlay, and something I should probably have around for general use anyway). Next up was figuring out a design. Turns out there are a couple of ways to go about constructing an end grain board, but for the approach taken in Marc’s video, there’s a very cool cutting board designer called, er, Cutting Board Designer (or CBdesigner) that I found excellent for planning my build.
![CBdesigner screenshot](https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7503/16273051962_9bdd07dc8b_z.jpg)
You can export or print your design in PDF format, giving something like the above screenshot to take into the shop. And you can export the final design itself as a JPG, to admire its wonderfulness before proceeding, as seen below.
![CB designer - JPG of final design](https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7530/16088008537_e54cdfd81a_o.jpg)
The match between expectations and final product, design-wise, was pretty impressive. It looked almost exactly as it was meant to in that regard.
![End Grain Cutting Board](https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7482/16086336968_7b178006af_z.jpg)
![End Grain Cutting Board](https://farm9.staticflickr.com/8602/16087749459_b6a40277f6_z.jpg)
Unfortunately, my belt sander technique still needs some work, and some over-zealous and in places uneven sanding resulted in a board that photographs well from one side, but which is not quite up to my not unreasonable standards for release into the wild. We’ll give it a good home though.
So not bad for a first effort, but I need to try try again…