I made what I thought would be a simple cutting board for my niece's wedding this weekend. Turns out, there were are few challenges.

The cutting board itself is a simple vertical grain board. The walnut I had available, though, had what turned out to be pretty ugly sapwood that really detracted from what I wanted to be a uniform background. No kidding. So the only solution I could think of was to dye the board, which I did and turned out OK. But that prevented me from being about to glue in the inlay I intended to use and then surface everything at once. OK, plan B, install the finished inlay in the finished board.

The inlay turned out to be the real challenge. Try as I might, the male letters and numbers chipped out no matter what I did. I tried ebony and bloodwood, with several different machining strategies, to no avail.



In contrast, the Celtic marriage knot machined just fine. Go figure. So I ended up pouring epoxy in the female recesses for the letters. I like how the color is a little darker than the bloodwood, but I had several bubbles that were a pain to refill, more than once. I never did successfully get rid of all of them. I have no experience with pouring epoxy, something I'll have to work it. But I was smart enought to seal the background wood so the epoxy wouldn't stain it.



Here you can see the pores from the bubbles:




Here's the finished board, sitting on a display stand I made for it.









John