Adventures in End Graining (Don’t do this!)

Finally made my first end grain cutting board. This was such fun project and a great gift for my mothers 66th birthday. Like all projects I did a bunch of research on how to make it. Watching YouTube videos from Jonathan Katz-Moses, Fix This Build That and Steve Ramsey to name a few. All were great at giving me the tour of the world of cutting boards with tons of tips and tricks. I felt confident I could do this and set to work. I knew the pattern I wanted to achieve and picked up a board of Beech and some short pieces of Purple Heart. I had a bunch of Walnut cutoffs about 12 inches long that I picked up off market place and started milling. My first mistake was using these short lengths. This effectively gave me 5 separate glue ups that I had to do, just to make sure I would finish with the correct amount to achieve the thickness I wanted. Had I had the correct lengths of boards, I would have had one. It still worked, but gave my much more work than I needed and there was a lot of wasted wood.

All was going well until I got to leveling out the final glue up. For context this is the point when the pattern is accomplished and all that beautiful end grain is smiling back at you. So how do I flatten the board before sanding. Well in face or edge grain boards I’ve see all the YouTube gods pass the board through the thickness planer. So I figure, why can’t I? I set my planer to a very shallow pass (1/64), stepped to the side and push the board through. Within one second the planer took the board and spit it out 7 feet across my shop! I then proceeded to change my underwear. The good news was all the Titebond 3 glue I had applied held together great and the board was still intact, but there was now a huge gash in the beginning of my board. I proceeded to look up “end grain planer kick back” and discovered what I had just done was a big no no. Why didn’t any of the tutorials ever say not to do this?! I proceeded to validate the state of my blades on the the planer and found this:

Not only was one of the blades cracked but the guard holding it down was now bent. I should be able to get a replacement (I hope🤞) but what a costly lesson.

I was able to resolve my issue by cobbling together a router planing sled and slowly shaving the board down to level (check out Walkers Woodworks video https://youtu.be/E_s8WCMu0GQ). I have also received recommendations that I could use sacrificial face grain boards glued to either end pass that through the planer and then cut off the ends once finished. But I don’t think I have the guts to try that out. Another option of course is to use a drum sander, but I don’t have one of those (maybe one day).

In the end the board came out great and my mother was ecstatic. But lesson learnt.