Juice Groove Heaven

Odd though it sounds, this is one of the best uses come up with so far. I do cutting boards and butcher blocks (otherwise by hand) every year for weddings/Christmas/etc and juice grooves are the bane of them. Doing them with a router and edge guide is finicky and tough to get perfect: burning, bumps, etc, all either ruin the piece late in the game or require hours to repair.

As opposed to a 10 minute rectangle and toolpath in CC and a 2.5 minute job in CM.

Juice Groove Nirvana

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What materials and how was that prepped?
It looks like “grouted” wood almost.

Hard maple and padauk, endgrain throughout. Sanded up through 220g before the groove is run. Carpet taped to the wasteboard for machining, then sanded the groove to 220 as well.

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just wow… do you prep these boards your self or is it off-the-shelf.
I can’t get over the thin/dark padauk inset.

I was looking into making some cutting boards with a design I’ve posted here before. But I no longer have a planer/joiner as I did when I made them a couple of decades ago. That led me to looking at butcherblock countertops, thinking it might be affordable to buy a 1 1/2-inch thick unfinished top and cut it into proper sizes to make either edge grain or end grain boards. My first stop was Home Depot, where they sell a European maple that has “similar looks and physical properties as hard maple.” It seems if you could cut out the labor to cut, plane, glue, flatten, square, level from sticks it might be worthwhile looking at a countertop as a source. Of course, if you want a fancy pattern, it will still take a lot of work, but still… Have you looked at any of this “European maple” or maple countertops from other sources that might work? My local hardwoods place quoted me $9 a board foot for 8/4, so there was a savings looking at the unfinished countertops.

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I make them myself from scratch. Thanks for the kind words!

Really nice work Adam.

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