Thread: What wood would I use for cutting boards?

I have not made any of these myself but I am sure that if do a search you will find quite a few posts with the info you need.
As far as finishing, I am sure you will not get better than "Foodsafe Oil" made by our benevolent dictator, the owner of this forum.

I made a couple for last Christmas. First ones ever by me.

I avoided an end grain configuration because one was to be used for carving roasted meat. The end grain will absorb almost any liquid over time.

The woods that I chose were hard maple and cherry. The pieces were ripped to about 1-1/4 inches, oh poop... I forgot...
I started with 19mm stock and ripped them to 31 or 32 mm wide. Then the pieces were glued together along their 32 mm sides. (a.k.a. Face grain to face grain) This gave the cutting board a 32 mm thickness. I didn't have a lot of cherry so it was used as an accent and as splines. The design loosely follows the plan in Woodsmith.

For a finish I used walnut oil. The oil is also used as a salad dressing but it doesn't turn rancid. I didn't notice any price difference between the walnut oil from the market or the woodworking store. I'll probably get an argument about this, but the walnut oil sort of cures. The walnut oil doesn't cure like some of the other curing oils but it cures enough to prevent the oil from going bad. I put on 5 or 6 coats of walnut oil allowing a couple of days of curing time between coats.

There are two schools of thought with cutting boards, end-grain & long-grain. I belong to the long-grain school. My reasons are 1. they are far easier to make, because they can often be made from off-cuts of a single board. 2. If you do need to laminate, either to get the width or introduce some contrasting colours, it's a simpler process, & the bits tend to hang together better, and 3. end grain slurps up liquids faster, putting stresses on those glue joints and also possibly adding taints to whatever is cut on them next.

But lots of people favour end-grain styles, and they obviously work if carefully made, so it's up to individual taste. Just about any wood you can name can do the job, but best to avoid woods that either bleed dark pigments or react with iron when wet, like many Eucalypts do, though mountain ash is fine (Merbau would have the be the king of bleeders - avoid it like the plague!). In Oz, the choice of pale woods is pretty scant, but pine is good (radiata & Hoop - Cypress (Callitris sp) might be a bit too resinous and add flavors to things, but maybe not, have never tried it. The Flindersias (Qld Maple, Crows ash, Silver ash) are good non-tainting species. Turpentine (Syncarpia sp.) is excellent, but heavy. Can't think of any other woods I've used, but I'm sure there are a few more. Must be dozens of suitable types...

Cheers,

I have made some end grain cutting boards and they are great.

Best to use hard woods rather than pine and I have used american oak, Tasmanian oak and gum. Cherry and maple are hard to come by here in aus and rather expensive.

For finishing.....use mineral oil. It is the best around.

Originally Posted by IanW

In Oz, the choice of pale woods is pretty scant

I couldn't agree with this more. I have no problem finding a ready supply of redgum or jarrah for the dark timber but trying to find a readily available (and reasonably priced) lighter timber is a real challenge. Oregon seems to fit the bill as far as readily available and reasonably priced, but it isn't a great contrast against the redgum or jarrah.

I have a blanket box that I made about 10-15 years ago and it was easy enough to get good thick sections of Tassie Oak from Mitre 10 for the frame (sold as just hardwood at the time) for only marginally more than pine at the time. Even now trying to find something over 19mm in Tassie Oak is difficult. Obviously there are specialist timber merchants that can get what you need but it certainly is interesting to note how the larger profiles of lighter timbers has dropped out of the main stream line.