End grain cutting board all Neanderthal?

[Brian Holcombe]

I use a softwood cutting board, and I see that Sitka spruce is regularly recommended for cutting boards (not end grain, but face grain).

The cutting board is much harder on the knife than the food is (unless you hit a bone or pit), so whatever you can do to minimize that will have your knives last longer between sharpening.

[Stanley Covington]

Try a low angle jack plane, with the mouth set wide, a cambered blade, and skew it to the direction of travel. Commit the weight of your whole body into each stroke, and be relentless (no hesitation). I find it helps to listen to heavy metal music.

[Allen Jordan]

I used planes to flatten this end grain cutting board:

G4qYpU9.jpg

You can see the flattening in progress here:

QtZAhW9.jpg

Initially after glue-up, I used a coarse wood-bodied plane to remove the dried squeeze out. Then I used my LV LA jack plane with the 25 degree blade, freshly sharpened and set pretty lightly. I also beveled all the edges with a block plane ahead of time to prevent grain blow-out. Planing at a skew helped. Took a long time, but worked eventually. I did hit it with a ROS after to make it absorb finish better.

[Mike Cherry]

Try a low angle jack plane, with the mouth set wide, a cambered blade, and skew it to the direction of travel. Commit the weight of your whole body into each stroke, and be relentless (no hesitation). I find it helps to listen to heavy metal music.

Call me crazy, but this seems like a good excuse to dial up Metallica on Spotify!!

[Mike Cherry]

I used planes to flatten this end grain cutting board:

G4qYpU9.jpg

You can see the flattening in progress here:

QtZAhW9.jpg

Initially after glue-up, I used a coarse wood-bodied plane to remove the dried squeeze out. Then I used my LV LA jack plane with the 25 degree blade, freshly sharpened and set pretty lightly. I also beveled all the edges with a block plane ahead of time to prevent grain blow-out. Planing at a skew helped. Took a long time, but worked eventually. I did hit it with a ROS after to make it absorb finish better.

Before you posted I was fairly convinced this was a bad idea. I think I might just give it a go. What kinda wood is this? Looks like maple and mahogany?

[Stan Calow]

For cutting boards that will actually be used for cutting, I've used wide solid maple pieces. You can get a stack of wide "shorts" of birdseye or curly maple from some lumberyards, that are big enough, and pretty enough without having to glue up smaller pieces. My experience with cutting boards is that sooner or later, regardless of what you tell people, they'll go in the dishwasher, ruining the glue up.

[Ryan Mooney]

I'm quite sure this was done in the past, based on some of the antique butchers blocks I've seen floating around. Whether or not anyone enjoyed the process and how often is another question altogether. I've seen two styles of thick antique butcher blocks, the "round off of a tree" and the "large number of boards fastened together". The latter appears to be a somewhat more recent invention from around the 1880s or so. Although I haven't found a good base source for the earliest ones, it still shows up as a relatively recent innovation circa 1912

https://books.google.com/books?id=7Q...0Block&f=false

The comment about finishing the blocks on a lathe is interesting, but I believe that was in reference to making them round, not finishing the tops. The sycamore references for the older tree-round style blocks is also interesting..

I think the round block one we had when I was a kid was ?fir? there wasn't much else that grew around there except cotton wood which would at first blush seem to be a bit fuzzy. A few years back I made one out of black locust which survived ~4 years without splitting (last time I looked - its at a friends house I haven't been to in a couple of years), it was actually clean enough from the chainsaw we just used it as it was (it was being used for backyard chicken chopping).

I also found a Canadian patent from 1906 for the dovetail variety (https://books.google.com/books?id=gs...0block&f=false), although it may have been used somewhat before that I'm dubious that those were extensively hand cut so they were likely also machine surfaced in at least some cases.

There appear to be a decent number of patents for re-surfacing machines like: https://www.google.com/patents/US1205322 and https://www.google.com/patents/US1899204 among others so it seems there was at least some demand for alternatives.

Stanley did make a plane purported to be especially for this purpose: http://www.supertool.com/StanleyBG/stan9.htm#num64 - basically a long body low angle plane, whether they sold very many is another question as the plane seems to be quite the rarity and commands a commensurate price (http://www.handplane.com/55/stanley-...s-block-plane/ - something to add to the elusive search for rare planes to fund the purchase of useful ones I suppose).

Its also worth noting that most of the surviving butcher blocks have a 2-4" hollow in the middle from being scraped and cleaned over the years, so flattening then wasn't an ongoing process and likely they weren't perfectly flat to begin with. Its entirely possible that most were cut and then scraped "clean" using some sort of scraper (there are a number of patents for butcher block scrapers as well - mostly for cleaning as best as I can tell but maybe they were used for initial conditioning as well?).

This topic has (somewhat unsurprisingly I suppose) been covered here a couple of times before:
http://www.sawmillcreek.org/showthre...-butcher-block
http://www.sawmillcreek.org/showthre...ning-end-grain

So I'd encourage you to go for it with a nice sharp blade, maybe using a toothing plane to get it flat first and then a low angle smoother to finish it off and report back on how it all went for those of us not quite motivated enough to try it ourselves

[Mike Cherry]

Ryan that's quite the reply you have left us. Maybe more background on this project from a handtool perspective than the whole thread combined. I suppose I now need to buy a toothed blade. I'm gonna have to finally choose between my LN low angle jack and my LV low angle jack. I need to sell one or the other....

[Ryan Mooney]

I was curious about the history because of the old blocks I'd seen which made me wonder.. how did they do that?

I started thinking about this a couple years back when a friend bought one of the dovetailed variety and wanted to use it more as decor than functional which required flattening the top (it had the common ~3"+ dip in the center). In the end I told her to build a router sled (yeah I know wrong forum, but seriously - taking off 3" of end grain hard maple looked... hard) and then she hired someone to do it. I don't know what they did, it came back flat anyway. I suspect not a drum or belt sander both because it was a solid ~2'+ thick even once the top was taken down so it would have had to have been a serious machine and because of the rather hilarious story I found about how well that doesn't work with all the old fat in them. You can find the story with the google search "site:forums.finewoodworking.com old butcher block belt sander smoke"

I'd probably try it without the toothed blade see how it goes before spending the money, the worst is you loose an hour or so to some exercise. Sharpen up extra sharp, set the blade super close, wax the sole, and have to (and bevel the edges). Having said that you may well be happier with one if you're doing any number of them, but I'd still say try it first just to see..

[Mike Cherry]

Yea that's a good call. As an aside, I can keep putting off my decision about which low angle Jack I want to keep lol

[Brian Holcombe]

I have a toothed blade that can go for sale, for LN. I don't use it.

That being said I don't think it's useful for this project, a very sharp blade will do fine. Take light cuts and chamfer the outside edges of the board to prevent chip out.