Cutting Boards - Part 10

Last time I finished with flat curved prefabricates with drilled out ends. With these I moved to the belt grinder with 40 grit belt.

On the rough belt, I took material on both flat sides until the pieces all had a trapezoidal cross-section.

After that, I rounded up all edges and removed some more material until all the pieces had a "banana" shape.

To smoothen out the surface I screwed a slightly bent headless screw into one hole that I put into my accu drill. With a bit of care, that sped up significantly the smoothing of the surfaces on the belt sander all the way up to 120 grit.

To cut the 6 mm steel into 70 mm pieces I used a stand with an angle grinder and an impromptu end-stop.

I rounded the ends of all the pieces with an accu drill and a file

To bend the steel pieces I made a simple template from black locust wood. As a lever for bending I used a steel pipe with inner diameter 6 mm. It went all reasonably fast.

I chose ten wooden handle pieces for the current boards and I bent two pieces of steel for each of them until the ends sticking out were in parallel and at a right angle to the inner side of the handle.

The remaining part of the process was essentially unchanged from last time. I cut notches in the ends of the steel parts with an angle grinder and I drilled two holes into each board. In the end, I glued everything together with epoxy and I held it together with a constrictor knot until the glue set.

And when doing this I decided to do a little test – if I can replace the epoxy with polyurethane glue. It hardens better in cold environment, it has only one component and it is several times cheaper. I did not do the test yet because I was sick for a week. But I hope to do it now and write about the results next week.