I got a wild hair to make some Cheese Boards for Christmas presents this year. OK, not the most practical thing to do, Christmas time is almost totally insanely busy. But I was able to persevere. A Cheese Board is a small cutting board for serving cheese and crackers. I did not have any real plans to work from, just did a bunch of research on the Internet and came up with a simple design.
There are a million variations of cheese boards out there. My Cheese Boards are 13” long by 8” wide by about 5/8” thick. I made them out of Bubinga. The light colored stripe you see running down the length of the board is Maple. Bubinga is an exotic hardwood found primarily in Africa. It is very expensive, very dense and very hard. Everything I read online said that Bubinga is easy to work, but that was not my experience. I had a terrible time planing Bubinga to the thickness I desired. It just did not plane very well and I have new blades in my planer. Your mileage may vary, of course.
Anyway, as you can see, Bubinga is a very beautiful wood. Depending on the actual board you get, it can go from a walnut colored brown to a deep mahogany red. The grain patterns are great.
After my planing I cut the boards to size and used round over bits for the top and bottom edges on my router table. All of that process went pretty well. Had to do alot of finish sanding, but in the end the boards came out nicely. Since food is prepared on them, I just finished them with General’s Butcher Block Oil, it is food safe. Be sure and check out the photo gallery of the production process.
Doug
