Earlier this year my wife and I made a simple cutting board for ourselves and when my Mom saw it on a call she said she wanted one. We stepped it up a notch and made this one for her Christmas gift this year…I hope she doesn’t see this post before Christmas but suspect she doesn’t look at this site too often.
We started with a cutting board kit from Woodcraft and glued it up, planed it, joined the edges on the router table with a wide cutter and a shim behind one fence plate, then squared it up and had it all ready for the Shapeoko. The wood is Angelique (an African mahogany or relative of mahogany), Wenge, and Hard Maple.
We have a Shapeoko Pro XXL and I programmed up the cuts using carbide create and Shapeoko tooling with standard speeds and feeds for hardwood. I drew up the juice groove and minion-looking character with the cleaver in each corner. I happened into some luck programming by putting the little guy in one corner, programming it, then going back and patterning, then rotating the other three. The software updated the cuts to handle all four with no extra programming…thanks Shapeoko for that cutpath link checkbox! I made the juice groove by a slotting with the 1/4” cutter, then using the profiles for the inner and outer edges to run contour cuts on each one with a 1/4” ball nose. It came out great with excellent z repeatability between those cuts.
After it was all done I ran the vertical corners through the router table with a 1/4” round over bit, then put a 1/4” bevel on the bottom to give my Mom something to get her fingers under for picking it up. I sanded it up and applied some mineral oil. Here it is…
