Hardwood Cutting Boards
CNCROi.com can make custom hardwood cutting boards out of any material, size and shape, in this project, we made them in the shape of an island, both identical.
The material that we made these custom hardwood cutting boards is laminated Maple, it’s a hard wood, as the name implies and the lamination helps prevent warping by mixing-up the material densities.
The nice thing about Maple is that the wood is pretty clear, free of knots and other major defects as the mill got rid of those before laminating the board together which CNCROi.com uses to make the custom hardwood cutting boards.
For this entire project, we used the same bit, an upcut, which is why you see the sheering upwards of the wood grain, this isn’t an issue in the slightest as this board will be sanded, which will remove all of this.
Black walnut is a great material for cutting boards, dimensional lumber, laminated or live edge, it all works for us.
When it comes to custom hardwood cutting board production, we generally do the juice ditch all around first before cutting out the rest of the board, due to the size and shape of these cutting boards, I had to add tabs to hold it in place, again, this was sanded off after the fact.
I just finished-up a big plastics project at CNCROi.com, as such, there are still a few black stragglers that you’ll see throughout this video and photos, but again, not an issue, they don’t bond in anyway to the laminated Maple and are just blown off after production.
Laminated boards are best for cutting board use, they are a lot more durable, even if you, like me, wash them in the dishwasher.
The depth of the juice ditch is 1/8″ deep, which is plenty for this small a batch of custom hardwood cutting boards.
As Maple is a hardwood, it can be very difficult on machinery, so the way around that is to just do multiple passes to cut it out until the entire board is cut out, minus the tabs of course, which hold everything in place.
The ShopBot Alpha has no problem powering through this laminated Maple, it does a wonderful job of producing in physical form what CNCROi.com designed digitally.
When it comes to the material options for custom cutting boards, Corian is a very SOLID choice, it’s rough on knives but lasts pretty much forever if you take care of it, it’s made of compressed acrylic.
The chip load is perfect as well, I’m not producing fine saw dust nor am I producing big chunks of wood during the cutting paths.
You can now see a few strings of black plastic falling onto the work, they get hung-up in the brushes of the dust system and just fall off randomly, there is an incredible diversity of projects we do at CNCROi.com.
This was a pretty small project, we’ve made HUGE cutting boards in the past that were several square feet in size, these about about the size of two hands end to end, the perfect size to put away when not in use.
The overall custom hardwood cutting boards came out fantastic, the production was smooth and without issues, these are the kind of projects CNCROi.com does that I’d do all day, everyday, and enjoy every minute of it.
Both premade bamboo cutting boards or those made from scratch at the shop are fair game for us, premade is cheaper though, we generally get those at the dollar store.
When it comes to cutting boards, if you wanted this made out of Black Walnut, Red Oak or any other wood species, solid or live edged, that’s not an issue for CNCROi.com.
You have to keep in mind that any aspect of even this cutting board, could have been further modified, from the depth and width of the juice ditch to the laser engraving that we performed at CNCROi.com off-camera, you aren’t stuck in any molds of how things are made.
The laminated Maple board is oversized, I always buy MORE than I need for any given project, because this allows us to make extras and already have the wood on hand for other jobs that invariably pop-up after doing a blog post about CNCROi.com making such products.
Now that these custom hardwood cutting boards are finished being made, you can see how great these will look, right now, they are still a diamond in the rough, but that will be fixed very soon.
It’s quite amazing what we can do to custom cutting boards using a mixture of lasers and routers at the shop.
Cutting out tabs to remove the custom hardwood cutting boards is performed using our vibratory tool, it’s something I bought a long time ago, always thinking I don’t know what I’ll use it for, but has been such a useful tool for a wide variety of project I perform at CNCROi.com.
After sanding, you can see how these custom hardwood cutting boards look, Maple is really a fantastic hardwood for cutting boards, it’s easy on knives, easy to clean and naturally, as most wood are, antibiotic by nature.
Looking at the close-up, you can see how tight the lamination is, we do a lot of this at SandboxRanch.com manually, and its a feature I’ve come to recognize very well.
Need custom hardwood cutting boards? Contact CNCROi.com right now!