A few months ago Aaron and I made a nice maple cutting board. It turned out well, and therefore deserves a blog post. I haven’t really done much woodworking, this was definitely my first real woodworking project since high school.

All woodworking starts from an average-looking wood blob. However, this block started out special: it was curly maple, which will give the final cutting board a very interesting 3-d looking pattern. Additionally, this wood was special, coming from a tree grown on the farm owned by John Quincy Adams, which is cool.

The boards were cut to length and then jointed on three sides.

The boards were then planed to 1.750″ thick, TO THE THOU!

Next up was deciding on the arrangement of boards. Two of the boards had slightly darker areas, and some of the boards had particularly curly areas or knots. The knots were aimed down and the darker wood put on the outside. Once we were satisfied with the layout, it was time for some glue.

I used a bit too much glue, Aaron’s glue application technique was perfect tho. Then we clamped the board.

While the glue was drying, Aaron and I finished up a great experiment which we had prepped before. We had two different sourdough starters, made in different states (his in MA, mine from VT). The two starters smelled quite different, Aarons smelling somewhat like apples and mine smelling more like vinegar. Using these starters, we made two identical loaves of sourdough, kneaded in the same way, for the same amount of time, from the same flour, etc. We did a taste test once the loaves were done.

The results: The two loaves tasted the same, but were ever so slightly different in both texture and smell. It was possible that the texture differences were due to slightly stronger kneading by Aaron, however the smell was ever so slightly noticeably different between the two loaves.

Once the glue had finished drying, the board was squared up on the table saw. We went for some vague dimensions which Mike had texted us as the biggest board which would fit on our countertop. The board was pretty big though. Nice and heavy because it is maple. We then routed the edges and sanded the whole board. Once the board made it back to my apartment, it was time for a liberal layer of mineral oil. The oil revealed the board’s true color, which was excellent.

And, the curly maple became clearly visible! It doesn’t really show in photos too well, but it looks beautiful.

A quality project. The cutting board made it to the lake for the great MITERS Boating Adventure.

Stay tuned!!!