Of course it's way easier. You can fit ten cutting boards on one set of bar clamps. Adjusting the planer takes longer than sending one board through. You only have to change sanding paper 3 times instead of 3N. You only have to change your router bits twice instead of 2N. You only use one rag per finish pass.
Side note: what planer are you using that sending work through is quicker than adjusting the height? Every planer I have ever used takes less than 5 seconds to adjust the height.
It only takes four seconds for a board to go through mine. Takes much longer to crank the wheel down from the 5" I had it at before.
I’m not a woodworker most of the time, but I am building a 35 foot privacy fence at my house from rough redwood that I have to prepare myself (flattening, ripping, etc), and I would rather die than prepare the wood for more than one section of the fence at a time. I like doing it the hard way where I just do a bit at a time because it’s more enjoyable. If this were a job, I would certainly plane everything then cut everything then oil everything then drill all the holes then cut down the boards then I would bring that onsite to assemble it in a few days. Instead it’s going to take three months.
If your 32 inch planer processes 5 feet in 4 seconds? That's 75 feet per minute! What kind of dust collection do you have?
Best example I've got is an 3D cubes design. Took me a week to make one of them, took me a week and a half to make 12, with less wastage due to division remainders.
Sanding, edge routing, handles - all goes so much faster when I only have to set up the drum sander once, the CNC once, each grit on the the palm sander once...
As for clamps, those certainly are not the limiting factor. Harbor Freight clamps are less than $10, can be exchanged no questions asked if (when) they break, and you can never have enough of them anyways.
One of the more disappointing things about being a programmer-woodworker is that as a programmer, as soon as I've got something that works right once it's no effort at all to chuck a loop around it to repeat it a bunch of times.
In woodworking, on the other hand? Putting in 20 screws takes almost twice as long as putting in 10.
To add confusion: These are for kitchen use.
To add more confusion: They were purchased from Aldi.
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QdXvBtN3iE&t=4m44s
Go with edge grain.
Also: lean towards teak wood. It has a resin that naturally repels moisture (it's why it was used on boats for so long (until man-made material became popular)).
There are also pros and cons to using wood versus plastic:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GETfxYaBj3w
(Sanitation seems to be a non-issue, though if you have a dish washer, plastic may be more convenient.)
The recommended wood-based product is from Teakhuas, who have a bunch of information on their sourcing:
* https://teakhaus.com/blogs/why-teakhaus/tagged/certification...
As for strength and hardness, for the vast majority of people the difference will be negligible thanks to modern glues. Maybe you'll notice that your knives won't dull as fast with edge grain over end grain.
About the only people it would really matter for are if you need an actual butcher block which is going to be used for chopping continuously for 8 hours every day (do they even use them in commercial facilities still?). However, a genuine butcher block is a very different beast. If you find one it looks like it is made up of a hardwood (like maple) in 1x4ish lumber about 6 to 12 inches long. The rows are dovetailed in one direction and generally held together by a threaded rod in the other since hide glues sucked.
In my experience, modern edge gain boards are a marketing optimization to hide crappy wood. You can use smaller wood chunks and use a lot more glue.
ATK is basically a commercial kitchen that does a lot of volume with dozens of chefs/cooks. They've been recommending edge grain for at least a decade:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eiCNB0fId0U
I'm going to lean towards trusting their review process—that probably wails on these boards more than I ever will—more than anecdata.
> They wear better as you aren't cross cutting the fibers of the wood.
They did wear-testing with the help of Autodesk and a robotic arm (see 3m14s) that went at the boards thousands of times. This is in addition to the daily use they probably get at ATK.
If there is a wearing difference is, I doubt I'll hit volumes high enough for it to matter as a home cook.
LOL: my (late) uncle was a meat cutter and owned a butcher shop for many years: most of his surfaces were metal and plastic for easier cleaning.
> They cut a lot more cutting than any chef... and they are end grain
What butcher does and what a chef does are different things. Chefs do slicing, chiffonade, julienning, dicing, and chopping (vertical movements). Butchers do a lot quartering, deboning, chopping, and filleting (many more horizontal).
Further, if you look at a actual butcher blocks, you'll see that they were not tiny little cutting boards, but actual table/furniture. And the practical reason why they were what we now call 'end grain' is because they were a bunch of long pieces of lumber put together with some feet attached:
* https://archersantiques.ca/product/antique-butcher-block-193...
* https://antiquebutcherblocks.com/product-tag/historic-butche...
The tiny (3" in height) little things that are called "butcher block" nowadays are in the style of the giant tables of yore, but the fact they just happen to have a check board pattern is a aesthetic affectation to mimic that 'real' items of the past. Which is why splitting is probably a much more common occurrence as they're much less surface area for glue between the pieces, so 'moisture shifting' is more likely—which is why maintenance is much more important and needs to be done more often.
But feel free to get whatever: if you want to use up more oil in the regular maintenance of your cutting board (and having to do maintenance more often), I'm not going to stop you.
You boards are really cool.
There are some generic-ish jigs that a CNC and 3D printer help with, but those don't tend to change with board pattern.
Economies of scale would be realized by making lots of the same board, but then you're not doing custom one-offs.
Cutting boards are labor intensive and unless you can make dozens or hundreds of identical ones will never be profitable. The amount of work setting up different cuts, gluing repeatedly, sanding and sanding and sanding.....it's exhausting. Cutting boards are one of my favorite woodworking projects, but I make batches of them as gifts once every few years - which is exactly as long as it takes me to forget how much labor goes into them.
The power and dust collection requirements tend to be getting towards the bigger side of things for a drum sander as well. Most truly useful sizes are at least 240V if not three-phase.
You can crank out cutting boards like that with not much more than a bunch of clamps, a small drum sander, a miter saw, and a good vacuum cleaner - garage-friendly and under $2,000. The issue is the hours of manual labor you have to put into this, especially since people are not used to paying hundreds of dollars for a decorative cutting board.
There are custom cutting board businesses out there, but they just use a CNC mill to cut personalized shapes or messages in common stock. That's a larger capital investment but far less manual work.
Now drum sanders do take up space (though mine is on wheels and can roll to the side when not in use), and aren't the easiest machines to use and maintain. But when it comes to cutting boards it vastly reduces the labor. Most of the time is just waiting for the glue to dry.
"The Cutting Board Designer does not support IE because I'm not at work and I don't have to "
Just an observation that the open source ecosystem has been very patient with Microsoft – no obligation on anyone to support anything that doesn't suit them!
Also, I learned that the chevron pattern with rotation set to 90 degrees is out of my price range, as the materials would cost $2,281,620,945,495,674,000,000,000,000,000,000.00 .
Standard Board - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYBg-L3R9g8
Chaos Board - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=is7Qn5JuSV4
Restoring Butcher Block Table - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8R6Bmc3ztPg
Power tools are easier to learn to use, are more expensive, noisier, more dangerous, and turn wood into dust. Hand tools are more physically demanding, take up little space, are a pleasure to use, are quiet, and turn wood into lovely long shavings and coarse dust that falls onto the floor.
I was a professional woodworker for a decade, I rarely use power tools now if I can help it
Board makers, please make 11.5”x16.5” boards of whatever type. Despite use of US units, this is a universal size - it will fit in the bottom of a half-sheet pan (13”x18” top dimensions with sides tapering to bottom) which is AIUI an international standard. Standard size kitchen towel on counter, pan on towel, board in pan to catch any juices that spill off. Works best if board has feet to elevate it a bit and catch more volume.
Obviously useful for large roasts, but also superb for watermelon. Also a good size for standalone use, but the sheet pan method really helps. If you buy one fancy-finished sheet pan, it looks good enough to use at the table for service and keeps things clean.
But you will scratch the surface immediately, and you should be cleaning it aggressively, so you gotta keep that in mind before putting days or weeks into making a beautifully polished, highly detailed work of art.
Also: cutting tile is a lot more tedious than cutting wood. And it's definitely messier.
If you resign yourself to manufactured shapes for the bulk of your work, you're now kind of limited to the shapes and sizes you can buy. And then you have to hope that the sizes accommodate the size grout lines you want to use.
That said, if someone out there starts making actual Penrose tiles in the next couple of years, I'll buy some when I do our entryway. They've got time to tool up. It'll be at least that long before I'm willing to do another tiling project.
a)That's a really weak point that will probably be the first point of failure.
b)It's way more difficult to get that to line up properly in the real world (front and back, as the wood isn't always perfectly square) and will have a lot more obvious imperfections in the design.
I do quite a few cutting boards (mostly to use up scrap wood), and random patterns or a simple running bond hold up way better.
Most of these designs are nice display pieces, but will not hold up well to true kitchen use.
Maybe some kind of bitmask file upload?