Wedding Gift- Cutting Board

This is a gift for my cousins wedding, this June. I won't be able to attend, so I decided I would make her, and her husband to be, a gift that they can use on a regular basis. In this indictable I will show you the steps it took to construct this cutting board. Hope you enjoy and that I can help in your construction of a simple cutting board.

The first step that I took was to gather some left over wood that I had in the shop. I found a leftover piece of 5"by3/4" maple and a 1"by 3/4" white oak that I had. I have read in many different places that maple is one of the best woods to use for a cutting board, this is because of the tight grain that it has. I have also read that red oak would have been better to use, due to it has a tighter grain than white oak, but this is all I had.

In this step I cut my pieces to my desired lengths and arranged them into the shapes that I envisioned for this project. I then glued up all of the pieces with some wood glue, and clamped it up and left it over night to dry.

I then carefully took my clamps off, checked my work to make sure all the glue joints were secure. After a thorough check, I moved on to my planner,and took of an1/8" off of both sides to get my desired thickness.

I to the cutting board to my belt and disk sander. the disk is set with 50 grit sandpaper to shape my piece, and the belt is set at 80 to help shape as well. after a few minutes on both Sanders and my desired shape and smoothness, I moved onto hand sanding the board I started with 120 and worked my way to 320 smoothing out any edges and imperfections.

I decided not to go to crazy with the lettering, this was so that if they wanted to use the board,they wouldn't have to worry about food getting stuck in the lettering. So I chose to do a simple heart with their wedding date. I drew this on free hand,so that I had some sort of template

So I only have on style bit for my wood burner so this was a lot more difficult than it usually is. Have no idea on where the other bits are. Anyway, this was my attempt, I moved very slowly,and still didn't feel like I quite got the hang of it. After the burning, I decided to oil the cutting board. For this I used walnut oil. I know that food based oils can start to rot after a while, but I have been using walnut oil on my cutting boards for the last 5 years and I have never had a problem,but if you don't want to take the risk there is always butcher block oil, that also works great. This is the final step,until I have to ship it out for the wedding, hopefully they will like and use for a long time. I hope you liked my instructable, thanks for reading.