I don’t have my MPCNC set up in the garage at the moment due to a bit of life upheaval in terms of needing to store a bunch of stuff so I’ve ended up with another couple of ‘not-CNC’ projects that would have been a damn sight simpler if I had the machine running.
Recently bought a new bread knife to better handle the larger sourdough boule loaves I’ve been baking and it’s far too long for my existing knife block. Old 20cm knife on the right, new 32cm monster on the left.
Decided to make a single knife block that can sit on top of the existing one. I found some reclaimed skirting boards that were stored under our house when we bought it. I think they’re a native NZ timber called Rimu.
The board I chose started at ~100mm x 30mm and around 1m long but had a bunch of marks and chips from where the nails pulled through. The nice thing is that this only used a short length so I could simply avoid the worst of the holes/cracks/chips. I checked them for nail remnants and then ran them through the thicknesser to get them down to clean wood, which ended up being around ~18mm. I marked out a 60mm slot down the middle of the board then used blue tape and CA glue to add scraps of plywood to either side a few mm out from the markings. Then took a palm router with a pattern guide bushing and 1/4" spiral bit to route the 60mm wide slot down to 3mm depth. Cross-cut the board into 2 pieces and folded them back on themselves to kinda ‘bookmatch’ one end. Glued it up with Titebond 2 on the unrouted faces and left it clamped for a few hours. Took the clamps off, trimmed it to length and width with the tracksaw to get everything clean and right angle. Hit all the edges with a 5mm roundover bit then sanded, water popped, sanded again up to 180 grit before putting a coat of Rubio pure on it.
Sorry about the lack of in-progress photos, it was just a couple of hour ‘muck around in the shed’ project so I was just kinda winging it, but I’m so happy with how it turned out that I thought I’ll post it up here as it’s an awesome idea for gifts or useful items from random scrap wood.
I decided the cut the groove into both pieces and have the joint in the middle of the slot so that the grain would be mirrored but it could just as easily have been cut into one piece and the other piece stay plain. It could also be expanded out into a full knife block really easily this way by simply continuing to cut slots and laminate extra pieces together.
Seems like it’d be even simpler to do on the CNC. Have it surface the boards and cut the grooves in one pass. Could have easily added dowel holes for locating it when gluing up etc.
Hopefully that’s a little bit of inspiration and maybe jogs some ideas for what to do with some random leftover scraps or reclaim.
