Wood Cheese Slicer

This was one of those back burner projects that we had always had on our list, but just never really got around to making it. One of those, "let's just see if we can make it" type projects. The idea was to make a wood cheese knife and I think we achieved what we were aiming for.

Check out the video we made to go with this project.

What you might need (materials):

• Two types of wood
• Dowel
• Wood Glue
• Some kind of finish
• Food safe finish
• Masking tape

Tools:

• Various Sanders
• Band saw or scroll saw
• mallet
• drill

We just created our pattern on the fly. We roughed out a shape on one sheet of paper and then transferred it to another piece. The second time we ran the pattern from corner to corner on the paper to make it longer. Then we transferred that to our first piece of wood.

Note: these pieces of wood were already about 1/4" - 3/8" thick.

We cut the inner sections out with the scroll saw. These areas are both decorative and will help whatever is being cut to release from the blade more easily.

All of the outer cuts were done on the band saw. We made sure we stayed on the outside of the line when doing this. We will sand up to that line in the next step.

We used the disc and belt sanders to shape the knife up to the lines we had created. We also spent some time thinning the stock of the blade and also adding a slight edge to it.

After we had the shape we were happy with, we cut out the knife's scales. This is the outer shell of the handle. We just simply traced the handle of the first piece onto a second piece of wood and then made a pair of scales. We cut these out on the band saw.

We lined everything up and drilled some holes for the pins that will help give the handle its bulk and rigidity. We used wood glue to hold it all together and tapped pieces down onto the dowels with a rubber mallet. This worked out pretty well. You could also use clamps in this step.

We sanded down the remainder of the handle so that everything was flush. We then rounded over all the edges of the handle using a rotary too drum sander.

We taped off the blade with masking tape and sprayed the handle with a few coats of spray lacquer. Once that was dry we applied a few coats of cutting board finish to the blade. This is a food safe finish and worked wonderfully.

It's not the sharpest knife in the world, but it works pretty well for cutting cheese and I would assume other like foods. In the end, we set out to make something specific we had in our minds and ended up with something we were pleased with.

Hopefully, you had some fun seeing how this was made. Even more so, we hope it inspired you to make something. If you have any questions or would like to weigh in on what might have worked better, feel free to do so in the comments. If you didn't get a chance, make sure you check out the video. We would greatly appreciate it.