Making a scrap wood cutting board for my kitchen-Finally! Discussion and Plans

Hi Everyone,

Well it's a rainy day here but it is a little warmer than it was earlier this week so I decided to get down to the wood shop and make a much needed cutting board for my kitchen. Here's the story behind this:

Like most wood turners I have a large and ever growing pile of scrap lumber and I'm always looking for something useful to do with all of it. In the past I've made wooden cutting boards for friends out of these scraps and they always come out very well. And I'm also something like the carpenter whose house is falling apart-I use various scraps of wood as cutting boards. I don't have a fancy laminated one:

Ugly aren't they?

So, I went down to the shop and selected several specimens from the pile-red oak, hickory, white oak, lyptus, birch, and some yellow heart:

(and there is a little container of squirrel food for Bruce the official SWW shop squirrel. He didn't drop by today).

Plans
I'm going to rip all of these boards 1 3/8" wide, and then cut them 18" long and then laminate them together. Then I'll sand both faces smooth and oil it. If the wood fairies are in a good mood today (and they haven't been in a good mood for a while now) I should have a first rate cutting board for my kitchen.

Now I don't know about you, but whenever I dive into the wood pile for a project, I always wind up with more scrap wood than I began with. The pile grows and grows. How does this happen? I have no idea. One of these days I have the feeling that I'm going to walk into the shop and there's going to be a huge pile of wood scraps in there and it's going to look at me as say "FEED ME!" just like that big plant in Little Shop of Horrors. And then zap! that will be the end of Selkie Wood Works:

Ok, here are the wooden strips for the cutting board. I've arranged them and after lunch I'm going back down to the wood shop and glue them. Later this afternoon I'll release the clamps, scrape off the excess glue and then sand it smooth:

...and of course the wood fairies don't clean up wood shops...

More later,

VW