I made this as a wedding gift for one of my friends, I’m really happy with the way it turned out, seeing how many mistakes I made along the way and that it was my first actual project, other then cutting my name out of wood, and a few basic projects. (see the bottom for all the mistakes I made)
So this cutting board was a last minute gift idea I had. I had less then a week to do this and was scrambling right up until the last minute. I used my Shapeoko Pro and fusion 360 to design and cut the board. I made the board of of Walnut and Purple heart
This is a render of how the board and engraving would look. I was trying to decide whether or not to go with the bold font or the regular font, in the end I went with a hybrid, where I took the “T” and the “L” and combined it with the “ow” and the “er”. Originally I had wanted to put the name in the middle of the two strips of the purple heart, but was unable to as it would have looked really small. In the end I decided to not put it in the purple heart and rotate the board.
This is the only picture of the glue up that I have. This is when I was doing a surfacing pass to get the board flat before all the operations
This is the completed engraving before the resin pour, I decided to do the engraving before the full surface pass, that way I could poor the resin into the cavity and then come back and do the full surface pass all in one go, this would save me time in the long run, as I would have to do less clean up on the resin.
Poured resin, ended up going with a gold, kind of wishing I had done a purple resin.
Here I’m planning it down to its final height
Cut out the juice grove and adding a fillet to the edge
A little bit of sanding later and a quick wipe with water.
A lot of sanding later and some water, I let the board sit out in the sun to let the purple heat oxidize and deepen in color, its such a beautiful wood.
And the finished product, I used Walrus cutting board oil, and there wood wax to finish this, this is after 2 coats of oil and a layer of wax on the top.
Some of the mistakes I made:
This part pains me. I put in about 10 or 20 hours into the design and cam operations to make sure I could get it perfect on the first go. Because I was doing both side I used indexing pins and holes to align the board up. Those somewhat worked, when I did the drilling of the board and the waste board it worked perfectly, but when I flipped the board and did the operation again it some how got shifted to the side. When I did the cut out pass the sides did not line up properly, I ended up having to take a router to the sides and go over it to make them flush.
In the picture bellow you might be able to see a few different problems, the most obvious problem is the round over didn’t go all around the board and its not to its full depth. This was caused by me programing the tool incorrectly into fusion. The second problem is the the grove is not perfectly aligned, you can see a bump on the other side of the alignment hole. This, I think, was caused by the tool not being able to cut into some of the excess material, and prevent the machine from properly moving.
This mistakes saddens me the most, I had initially planed putting there name on both sides, but due to either setting the height of the surfacing pass properly, or not having the engraving go to the right depth the resin got wiped out.