Cutting Boards - Part 18

It is really freezing outside and it is not worth it to heat the workshop every day so I concentrated on other work this week. But I managed to do one board-related issue – rough gluing up of four two-colored boards.

Because I had to be more careful about positioning the stripes relative to each other, I had to glue them very slowly. I began by gluing together the four strips in the middle and once the glue set enough to hold together without the clamps (20-30 min) I added two more, one on each side. I waited for the glue to set again and then I repeated that until the whole board was glued-up.

I had to begin in the middle because the strips were not perfectly flat. Garapa is very hard - about as hard as black locust - but still not as hard as jatoba. Thus when flattening the wood on the drum sander the garapa pieces were sanded down ever so slightly more. I corrected that quickly on the belt sander but that made the strips slightly concave. The curvature was less than one-tenth of a mm, but such tiny mistakes do add up. Had I begun on one end and added strips in one direction only, the last stripe would have been noticeably bent. By adding strips from the center outwards, the final error margin is roughly halved between both outward strips.

I do not know whether or not I will work this week on the boards at all. It shall be freezing until the end of the week, so I might just wait for slightly warmer weather.