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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3413 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for March 17, 2023

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This week I made a butcher block.

Went down to the lumber yard and scooped up some 5/4 hard maple for $6 a board foot. Came out to $75 for 15 feet worth of 8.5" wide boards. I should be able to get 2 15x20x1.5 butcher blocks out of them, and then 1 smaller one of dimensions I haven't figured out yet.

I had a good time on this project. It was nice doing a simple project compared to my bookshelf, and also a project I planned to repeat so there was an aspect of learning and trying to figure out how to do it better. One is for my wife to beat the shit out of to determine if we want butcher block countertops. The other is going to be a gift. A third might be a reserve gift for a birthday that sneaks up on me.

If you followed my bookshelf project, you know how this goes. Chop it down to rough dimensions, get it on the plane sled, mill it flat to about 1" thickness. After than I only jointed one edge and began taking off 1 5/8" strips. I got about 5 per board minus a few which had defects.

After that, the goal is to set them on edge, so that the butcher block is composed of all the edge grain facing out, and all the faces are glued together. I intended to plane it flat after this process, but the whole thing won't fit in my planer. So I glued it up in two halves which would then get joined together at the end. This may have been a mistake. I'll come back to that later.

With the two halves glued up and flattened, I jointed the edge on my tablesaw and... there was a seam. A big seam. I'm not sure how or why. Both edges despite being run straight on my tablesaw had a slight inward bow to them. I grabbed a hand planer and fixed it as best I could, but I'm not very good at it. Then I went ahead with the glue up. Some of the seam was still visible so I tried a trick I saw where you take some fine sawdust from the project, and rub it into the seam with some glue. it worked ok. The seam is slightly visible, but you can't feel it with a fingernail anymore. Which is important for a butcher block because you don't want bacteria nesting in cracks and crevices that refuse to properly dry out.

I need a lot more practice routing, even with an edge guide. But I decided to go for it and route out a drip edge and handles. It could have gone better. As I slowed down at the corners especially, the maple burned. Some research after the fact indicated maple is notorious for burning when you route it. The only solution is to have a steady hand and a steadier feed rate so that the router bit doesn't stay in the same place for too long. This is clearly going to be the one we keep so my wife can beat the shit out of it.

Lastly I slathered it in as much tung oil as it could drink. This wood was thirstier than a teen boy on instagram. At first I worried that the 32 oz of food grade tung oil/citrus solvent I ordered wouldn't be enough not only for this board, but the other two I intended to make. I was watching it utterly vanish into the wood the moment the brush left the surface. Maybe 8 oz later it began pooling on the surface like it's supposed to when the wood is saturated. Minus the end grain, that shit stayed thirsty almost the whole time, but I got it to a point where the oil wasn't instantly being absorbed. It's going to take 30 days to fully cure, but should be usable with some caveats in 14 days.

I'm going to make another one this weekend. I think to avoid the seam between the two halves, I'm going to doing one massive glue up, but not glue that middle seam. My hope is the clamps keep everything oriented such that I won't need to joint that seam once the glue has dried and I've flattened them again. Then I can plane them separately and glue up that final seam. If that doesn't work, I might set up a straight edge and a trim router bit and attempt to get a nice jointed edge that way. If that doesn't work, I might set up my router table as a makeshift jointer by carefully setting up the fence so that one side is maybe 1/32" of an inch further out than the other, and getting it parallel with the edge of a straight bit.

Maybe next Christmas I'll treat myself to an actual jointer.

Why not just get a hand jointer?

So, I do have one, and I mentioned attempting to use it to joint that edge. It helped. But I'm just not good enough with it to get the job done to the degree I would have liked. Practice I suppose.

Sorry I missed that! You said makeshift jointer or something and I assumed.

Did you consider making an end-grain one?

I considered it, but I wanted to start with an end grain one. The 3rd, smaller one I make might wind up being an end grain one. See how much maple I have left after the second one gets finished.

Looks great regardless! Good work!

I always enjoy your woodworking reports.

I'm glad! I have a few more projects planned. A desk chair that has some rather unorthodox constraints so it can slide under a rather diminutive desk. Then probably a small table for the Starlink router that has a compartment to keep the slack cable in. Some sort of display case for minis. Debating whether I want to add some LED lighting to the back with a giant diffuser. It'll be a good excuse to add some soldering to a project. Going to make a clock for my daughter, where the face is poplar and some red oak splines make up the hour marks.

At some point the wife is going to coopt my labor when she finally finds a chicken coop she wants built.

It's gonna be a fun summer.

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