Thread: Finishing Victorian Ash cutting boards

After sanding to 300grit, you should have wet down the boards with water and then lightly sanded it smooth again after it had dried. You can still do it now even though you have oiled one of the boards, it will just be more difficult to sand but not impossible or overly time consuming.

Sanding, then wetting, then sanding again is good practice for finishing wooden items in general regardless of whether you are oiling, lacquering, shellacing, varnishing etc.

Thanks for the reply Kuffy I'll give that a go.

Because sand papers always scuff up a wood surface, I suggest that you use a cabinet scraper.
The fresh, square edge (+/- a burr) will actually cut the "fuzzies" clean off.

I make my own scrapers from lumber-banding steel strapping.
First used, all I could see was wood dust. With a magnifying glass, they were exquisite, curly shavings.
Not expensive to buy, should you go that way.

How do you hold the steel strapping for use as a scraper? The stuff we use at work is 3/4" wide, but I throw a fair few meters of 5/8" in the bin which was used by another company which we order components from.

I cut the strapping into 3" pieces with WISS aircraft metal shears.
I do my best to square off one edge, clamped in a vise.
Wrap some masking tape to mark the dull edge to hold.
True, they are a little awkward to hold.

I'd like to find bigger pieces of steel.
For the price, I might as well buy some!

also try not to dunk the board in water, plus leave more oil on to soak longer. I took our board over to a friends place to showcase my work (get a few orders etc) and everyone was suitably impressed but caught our friend just about to submerge the board in the sink before I stopped him.