Project Nr6: Valentines Cutting Board

To Surprise my girlfriend I decided to try to fabricate a cuttingboard, with a valentines print on it. Since it was a little bit busy past day, I upload this all at once today.
I started off with a combination of left over pieces of wood, cutting them at about the same length, and arranging the pieces in a nice order.

Gluing the pieces together and let it dry for a while. The bottles say: dry in 20min, but I took a couple of hours to be sure it sticks together very well.

Cleaning it up and cutting the edges didn't a lot of time. Since the pieces were not all of the same thinkness, I needed to flatten the board. My router did a very nice job. I used my cirular saw miter box to do the job. It worked out very well, but it's not that handy. I'll make a flattening jig for my router one of these days.

 



It start to look like a real fine board! Sanding with 80grit, cleaning with a with towel, 100grit and cleaning... Rounding the edges with the roundover bit... seems like the real deal! Some more sanding with 150 and 240 grit, cleaning with water in between passes and white spirit before the last pass to make dust and fat free before adding the ingravings ;-)

The real deal!

I wanted to mark the date and my callsign with a soldour iron and use a print for the drawing. As I didn't want to damage it in this stage I proceeded very carefully! First I burned the date and sign in the board and did a last sanding with 240grit, very gently...

To put the drawing on, I used a mirrored copy of a stencil I made myself, and then ironed on the cutting board. Since I had no experience with this technique, and I only saw it on youtube, I proceded very very very carefully! The picture went on rather well, and it has a vintage look. The only problem was that due to the temperature of the iron, some of the glue started to melt and came out of the joining edges of the board. Lesson learned... So there is a little damage, but since this cutting board is only going to be used for decorative purpose, it is not a very big deal.

The result after finishing it with woodturners-oil, to make it look a bit more shiny ;-)

First cutting board ever! I hope my girlfriend likes it...