The Beautiful Cutting Board....I Ruined

Okay so this was a learning experience, I was asked by a friend to make a gift for his "Stag" and I was going to put together a basket of preserved meats, some nice cheeses and a really high end cutting board that I would make.

I successfully made the cutting board which looked amazing I was SO Happy with how it turned out, but I just had to add one more thing that I thought was necessary. I wanted to add a " Drip Catch" around the outer edge of the cutting board to catch any meat drippings.

I have never used a router before and don't have a proper router so I decided I was going to try my "Dremel Router Attachment" because what could go wrong.

Now I didn't just dive into the process (that would be crazy) I set up scrap pieces of wood and tested the best method of routering the wood. After a few different tries I seemed to get the hang of it and decided I was ready to do it for real!!

The Fail;

I set up my cutting board and clamped everything down, grabbed my dremel, adjusted to the correct depth and went for it.........that's when everything went to hell. The Birds Eye Maple was NOTHING like the test wood. My dremel router shot sporadically back and forth every-time it caught a knot in the wood. To combat the crazy jumping of the bit I applied more pressure to the bit thinking I could hold it in place. Nope, what happened then is that, because the router attachment is entirely plastic the heavy pressure I was placing on the bit made the depth lock slip without me knowing so then I was accidentally now drilling through the wood deeper and deeper. The bit also bent slightly creating a double line that was well over halfway through the wood...... Ya cant sand that out!!

When I finally stopped and realized I had just completely ruined 40$ dollars for wood and 6 hours of work I had a brief freak out then calmed down and decided I could still use the piece but could not give it as a gift and I will have to make another.

Lesson; Use the right tool for the job, if you don't have the tool ask around.

Because this is Instructables here is a very brief description on How To Make a Cutting board;

1 - Buy wood

2 - Cut wood to length

2 - Glue Wood together

3 - Sand or Plane the wood

4 - Fine sand and smooth the wood

5 - Seal the wood with a good grade mineral oil and beeswax

6 - Finish

Pro tip*** Try not to completely destroy the wood during the making process***

Have a great day Everyone and remember no great person became great with out multiple failures