Making a Walnut Cutting Board

Hello All,
Well, it's been 9 weeks tomorrow since my knee replacement surgery and I can walk and move around perfectly so it's time to get back to the wood shop! I need to make a cutting board for a friend of mine and I have a large  block of walnut that is perfect for this. Here's the story:

Since the end of the recession, at least the end of it for me, I've been making things for folks who where kind to me during that terrible time. I can't count how many people bought spoons, cutting boards, bowls, etc, from me and helped to keep me afloat. And I think about those people a lot.

One friend bought an armful of cutting boards from me that I'm sure she didn't need and her purchase helped buy groceries that week. Sometime later she asked me for a walnut cutting board and since I couldn't afford that type of wood, I had to decline her request. Since that time I've looked and looked for some walnut that would work well for a project like this and earlier this year I finally found it. Since my knee was so bad, I couldn't work on making her a cutting board out of the wood-it would have to wait until after the surgery in August for me to be able to safely go out and work with power equipment.

And today is the day! Let's get down to the wood shop and take a look at some photos:

This is the block of walnut that I bought. It's a lovely piece of wood, brown with a lavender undertone.

The first thing I did was trim off the irregular ends and that big cracked knot at the left end:

Then I flipped it over and trimmed off a smaller knot:

There was a lovely fiddle back section that unfortunately was cracking so I removed that as well. The arrows point to the cracked area:

And this left me with a nice small chunk of walnut for turning later...

Here is the trimmed block. There are not defects left and the grain is straight. What a lovely sight. Now I know what you're thinking-why not leave this block as is and make the cutting board out of this and the answer is that it's too thick-it's 2 1/2 inches thick and it would make a large and clumsy to use board in someone's kitchen. It's also not a good size for chopping foods. Maybe in a restaurant kitchen that might work but not here.
At this point the block is 15 1/2 inches long and 9 1/4 inches wide and 2 1/2 inches thick.

Here is a side view of the block.

So instead of leaving it in one piece, I've cut it into 5 - 1 3/4 inch x 15 1/2 blocks. If I turn the block on their sides, I'll have an 11 inch x 15 1/2 inch wide cutting board when I'm through.

So my plan is to laminate these blocks and possibly add some detail by laminating in some mahogany or some hickory.

This is what the blocks look like stacked next to one another. This will be a nice size for a home kitchen.

I've taken the blocks inside and I'm going to let them settle down for a couple of days. In the mean time I'll think about laminating some color woods. One more thing I might do is drill the blocks so I can insert threaded rods inside of them to help pull the blocks together during the laminating process and to keep it from ever de-laminating. I'll think about that too.

Stay tuned,
VW