What's Your Angle?

A challenge is as good as a holiday. Alright, that should be a change with the holiday thing...but isn't a challenge just changing the way you do something?

Anyway, recently in the workshop, I set myself the challenge of making a fairly plain looking chopping board and then snazying it up with some artsy highlight strips. Not just through the middle horizontally; but at a whole other angle...in 2 different directions.

It all began with milling some pieces of Rimu, salvaged from an old 1970's desk a friend of mine gave me a while back. Then gluing and clamping and putting all that through the drum sander to make it flat.

So far so good. Many makers would probably call that done, do some final sanding, then finishing oil and on to the next one.

For a moment, I also considered this a possibility. But then I would not be rising to the challenge at hand.

It was with some nervousness that I started plotting out angled pencil marks on the board, where surgical incisions were about to be made...with a 10 inch mitre saw...

First cut was made at about 42 degrees. Then I set about gluing together a nice contrasting piece of Rosewood with a thin piece of figured Bocote – which is a exotic wood from South America.

Then it was time to put Humpty back together again for the first time. The trouble is, when you try to glue an angled piece of wood together and put clamps on it, the glue wants to slide the angle out of alignment. Plus I still wanted the horizontal strips of the Rimu to stay lined up. This meant of lot of cursing and ficky foodling around with clamps in all directions. Plus I ended up having to offset the original board to allow for the width of the new strip I was adding into the middle. This would need to be trimmed flush later, making the board about 10mm narrower than my original intention.

Once the glue had dried, there was more drum sanding and another 42 degree cut in the other direction on the mitre saw. This time I took a little bit extra out to allow for the thickness of the strip of wood. I still ended up trimming a few mm's off to make the sides flush again, so the board was narrower still.

My learning then was start with a slightly oversized board, before making the cuts. This has often been a problem for me. There have been box shelves I've made for my sister's bathroom that began at a certain size, then after mucking up the box joints of the corners a few times and trimming them off to start again, the shelves have ended up significantly smaller.

But that's what they say about woodworking – we take large pieces of wood and make them smaller.

Well, the final glue up on the abstract artsy chopping board all went to plan and the finished result I thought was quite pleasing – albeit not as big as my original plan.

So, I guess the lesson here is, sometimes we have to look at things from a different angle – even if it means cutting up something that's almost finished.