Ok apologies for not putting a video up sooner. This is a chopping board that I’m making and it’s oak. It’s going to be an end grain chopping board, and it’s actually made from some flooring cobbles that were thrown away somewhere, where I happen to be. And I decided to take a few and see whether I could make a chopping board, and er what I did was sanded the two faces on each block and made strips, and then with each strip I planed the two faces that would contact and then joined them together. It looks pretty good, I just noticed there’s a crack that just formed but on this side it’s pretty good. And what I’m going to do is level this using the CNC machine. Obviously if you were making this from scratch, with strips of timber you could get it pretty bang and avoid this stage of the processes but because of where I found the material this is quite essential. So in the same way that I levelled the bed of the CNC machine, I’m going to do that to this chopping board. So lets begin.

I’ve got these bits of 12mm ply, which I’m going to screw to the side to hold this in one place, and I think that should be enough to be honest.

Ok that’s pretty good.

Now I just need to decided what bit to use.

Ok I’ll go for this new bit. I actually got this from China and it’s an up-spiral bit and it was ridiculously cheap.

Ok this is starting to look pretty good but to finish it off I’m going to use a razor blade a little bit like a plane. I have two different types. I’ve got these flat edge ones, but I also have these rigged ones. But this finish on the blade makes it a little bit like a toothing plane. If I start rubbing the blade backwards and forwards on the top of this chopping board, I’m actually starting to take tinny amounts off. You can see it flaking off. And when you do this you want to make sure you have a good clean new blade. You don’t want to be using something that had any chips in it, which could effect the surface. I feel like this technique is a bit like knocking a cricket bat, it densens’s up the grain.

Ok I’m going to flip this around the do the other side.

Ok there’s a few things I need to do to finish this off, including finishing with some kind of oil and maybe adding some feet to underside. I’m not going to do that in this video but if you’d like to follow that process, you can add me or find me on Instagram, and I’ll be uploading images as I go along doing that.

I’m quite happy with this considering that I found all the oak as thrown away material. Erm, like I mentioned in the beginning they were cobbles, flooring cobbles. They were only finished on the top with some kind of wax based polish, that’s all be cleaned off with the CNC machine and that layer will make the underside of the board, just to kind of not seem to gross.  So the chopping board side was the underside of the cobbles. That had contact some adhesive so I cut into each block about 1 cm. Anyway I’m really happy with this, like I said follow me on Instagram to see the progress of this chopping board. Thanks for watching and don’t forget to sacrifice a thumb, and I’ll catch you during the next one.