Cutting Boards - Part 8

Once the boards were glued up, it was time for flattening, which did not go smoothly this time, unfortunately.

For some reason, the individual stripes wandered during the glue-up more than I hoped. The main reason was my gluing fixture. As I mentioned last time, I will have to think of something better. The boards were so wavy that I had to take out my router again to flatten them. I will have to work on the fixture for the router too, and I did already make some changes but unfortunately, I forgot to take pictures.

Once the boards were flattened with the router, the rest of the work went reasonably well. I cut the boards to size on the table saw and then I could go directly to the drum sander. It worked as it should and I changed grits from 40 all the way up to 180. To keep track of which side was already worked on and which not, I marked them with chalk between each grit change.

The resulting boards were nice, flat, and smooth. I disconnected the drum sander and changed the machine to the belt sander to sand the sides. Unfortunately, this did not work well again. One part of the problem was that I did not have fresh and sharp belts for sanding wood. I had no opportunity to buy them recently. So no matter what I did, the belts either burned the wood, or they barely scratched it. The second problem was noise. The boards resonated with the sander and the whole working table and it resulted in a downright hellish racket against which no ear protection sufficed. Not to mention that it was fairly hard on the hands too.

In the end, the best solution was to fix boards in pairs into the vice and use elbow-grease-powered sanding. Once the sides were sanded up to 180 grit, I knocked off the edges on the edges first on belt sander and then manually too. I had to do that because jatoba is so hard that it was possible to cut one's hand on the edges.

When the boards were nice, flat, and smooth, I could progress to the next stage – making the handles. This stage underwent the biggest change from the beginning. I will write about that next week.