Shopsmith Thickness Planer vs. Dewalt

[Erik]

RF Guy,

For a finished 2" cutting board approximately 10.5"x16" materials run about $90 ($90 includes glue, mineral oil and carnauba wax). Between the cuts and waste it is not an efficient use of materials. The good news is that for every 2 tumbling-block boards I make I usually have leftovers to make one of the Indian-blanket-design cutting boards. The blanket design is very efficient to make which drops the average cost of a 3 cutting-board run to about $60 per board.

As for the underlay for the Thien sled, I happened to have a thick piece of OSB and a 1" piece of melamine laying around that I stack on top of one another to make the underlay. The dimensions of the sled are approximately 2.5" thick, 12" wide, and 5' long which is perfect for the initially dimensioned rough-sawn boards that I typically work with. Like you I initially borrowed my wife's glue gun, but in the interest of peace have since bought my own .

-Erik

[BuckeyeDennis]

+1 on the Phil Thein sled technique. It works great, and a 3/4" thick "sled" is all you need. The hot glue makes the entire assembly nice and rigid, and there's no fussy adjusting of shims and such.

Dennis,

Thanks. Appreciate that you like this method as well. I'll probably get to building one of these then. My thoughts are to use 3/4" Baltic Birch plywood for the sled and I might embed some steel C channel in the bottom of it to maintain flatness for the sled bed over time. Only problem is the wife getting upset the next time she tries to find her hot glue gun!

My wife has a hot glue gun as well, but I bought my own. It’s MUCH bigger than hers.

4EA5F06E-F087-469C-8639-73101096C3F5.jpeg (25.39 KiB) Viewed 2579 times

If you’re working on a fairly large board, a high-capacity heat gun actually is a good idea. The one above costs $36 at Amazon.

Assuming that you have a flat surface (very important) on which to assemble the sled “sandwich”, there’s no need for the sled base to be terribly rigid. What happens is that the entire assembly winds up being a torsion box, and is thus inherently very rigid. The sled base is the bottom skin, the workpiece is the top skin, and the hot glue serves as the webbing. I like to use a 12” wide melamine-covered particle-board shelf (from the big box store) as the sled base. The masking tape sticks to the melamine well enough, but it’s still reasonably easy to pop it off of the melamine surface when you’re fnished flattening.

[KyClay]

Thanks Erik. Your reply was most helpful.

[RFGuy]

RF Guy,

For a finished 2" cutting board approximately 10.5"x16" materials run about $90 ($90 includes glue, mineral oil and carnauba wax). Between the cuts and waste it is not an efficient use of materials. The good news is that for every 2 tumbling-block boards I make I usually have leftovers to make one of the Indian-blanket-design cutting boards. The blanket design is very efficient to make which drops the average cost of a 3 cutting-board run to about $60 per board.

As for the underlay for the Thien sled, I happened to have a thick piece of OSB and a 1" piece of melamine laying around that I stack on top of one another to make the underlay. The dimensions of the sled are approximately 2.5" thick, 12" wide, and 5' long which is perfect for the initially dimensioned rough-sawn boards that I typically work with. Like you I initially borrowed my wife's glue gun, but in the interest of peace have since bought my own .

-Erik

Erik,

Thanks. I meant where/how did you learn to make the 3D cutting board? Did you have to go take a course from an instructor, or are there plans, DVD, etc? Before your post, I saw it somewhere online recently, but couldn't really find much on how to go about building one. The Indian blanket design one is really cool as well

[Gene Howe]

Nearly all my lumber is rough cut without a true flat face. Depending on the weight and length of the slab, I'll either flatten one face with a router sled or, if it's less than 6/4, I'll use a sled found in FWW in 2005.
https://www.finewoodworking.com/2005/10 ... ing-lumber
I use a DW 735 with the Shelix head.

[Erik]

RF Guy,

Aaaah, misunderstood your question. I learned how to do both boards from the internet.

Tumbling Block Design: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5n0LdU8ZOJU

Basket Weave Design: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RfA--IzZ9E

As I was making my first Tumbling Block cutting board I built a set of notes to help me avoid the mistakes I made in the first build. I have attached a PDF of that. The most helpful change I made to the MTMWOOD procedure was to oversize the maple sandwich boards a bit. This allowed me to use my planer to trim things back and exactly size the strips for the second glue up. One other thing I did was buy panel clamps off Amazon (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B073Q ... UTF8&psc=1) to get flatter, better glued up panels. You don't see them in my writeup because I didn't have them for the first board. It was $49.99 well spent!

-Erik

[RFGuy]

Erik,

Thanks. Really appreciate the info and the pdf file is a great addition to go with the video. Now I just need to get to building one of these next.