Juice Ditches on Black Walnut Cutting Boards
What are juice ditches? They are the same idea as on roads but for cutting boards – Black Walnut in this case – they hold the the water and other things that can flow onto your countertop while you cut meat, vegetables or fruits.
When it comes to your design options for custom cutting boards, CNCROi.com gives you an open slate, any species, size, shape or design works with us, in any volume and we can also do a mix of laser engraving and router carving as well.
When it comes to fruits and vegetables, unless you have a HUGE cutting board, you are bound to have juices flowing from your cutting board onto your countertop, a good way around this problem, instead of getting an even bigger cutting board, is to get CNCROi.com to create a ditch around outer perimeter of the cutting board to capture them.
Big or small, CNCROi.com does it all!
The same holds true with meats of all types, blood and fluids flood out that can make an especially messy mess to clean-up in the kitchen, hence, juice ditches solve this problem as well.
For this specific project, CNCROi.com is using a ballnose bit to create the juice ditches across many different Black Walnut cutting boards, but if you wanted them to be sharp, 60 degree, 90 degree or anything else you can think of, we an do it.
The depth of these juice ditches on the custom cutting boards is 1/8″ deep, yet again, CNCROi.com can go a lot deeper or shallower, whatever you want, we can do for our customers.
We can carve the cutting boards however you wish.
Juice ditches can be customized from depth to form, and can be done into any shape or size you want, so if you wanted it to be in the shape of a logo, not a problem, so I don’t want to you think CNCROi.com can only make square ballnosed juice ditches in Black Walnut cutting boards.
As a CNC router introduces pushing and pulling forces into the Black Walnut cutting board during the process of carving out the custom juice ditches, we need to hold them in place, they won’t fly off the table as the bit isn’t an upcut, but it can definitely move the board if it isn’t help in place.
Of course, there are a lot of wood chips and dust created during the process, but that’s no problem, the very fine problematic stuff gets sucked-up and the bigger stuff easily gets sucked-up after the process is complete and the board is replaced with another for the same process to repeat.
Our heaviest job laser engraving Black Walnut is below.
During an actual production run that doesn’t involved photography and video, of course, CNCROi.com would have the dust boot on the machine which means all the dust and chips are sucked-up as they are produced but looking at a big black thing covering the board during the juice ditching process isn’t the most exciting process, hence removing it.
When it comes to what’s possible, it’s endless, but another option that you may wonder about is can each board have a different juice ditch design? Absolutely!
As for production runs, this was a small one so the process was done one board at a time, but in a larger run, we’d actually cut them from live edge boards so the juice ditches would be carved out first then the cutting boards secondarily in one seamless process for efficiency sake.
We’ve done a lot of projects using Black Walnut, it’s a wonderful wood species to work with.
As for all the dust and wood chips on the boards, the router isn’t affected by them in the slightest during production, of course, CNCROi.com vacuums them up between boards to the Black Walnut isn’t resting ON it, which may cause it to be not flat on the table, but otherwise, the machine made it, the machine can easily make more even if some chips fall onto the board.
What I really enjoy about carving Black Walnut is that it makes the whole shop smell great!
The carving of these juice ditches was done on an individual design process because each cutting board was a slightly different size, so that needed to be measured and accounted for before each carve.
If you are wondering what laser engraving looks like on Black Walnut, enjoy the video below.
Although Black Walnut is a hardwood, it poses absolutely no challenge for our CNC router, the bit is sharp, the router is powerful and it just cuts the juice ditches cleanly and sharply without skipping a beat.
CNCROi.com has extensive design and production experience with wood, from live edge tables to smaller items like these cutting boards, whatever you need made out of wood, contact and and we’ll make it for you and ship right to your door.
For this specific project, the customer was going to finish the finishing process, adding beeswax and mineral oil after a light sanding on the Black Walnut cutting boards.
Production of these juice ditches went very smooth, having the right machine with an experienced operator makes things work very well start to finish at CNCROi.com.
We can also carve out shapes and logos just as easily for even more personalization options.
These juice ditches are carved a little less than an inch from the edge, but as with everything else, we can just as easily make them more or less however you wish.
When it comes to custom cutting boards, any options you can imagine can be produced by CNCROi.com.
As this job came close to an end, it’s great to review the whole job on video to see what can be improved upon in the next run of custom cutting boards that CNCROi.com makes.
Need custom cutting boards? Contact CNCROi.com right now!