If you’re looking for small beginner woodworking projects that are approachable while teaching real skills, it’s hard to beat a cutting board. A woodworking cutting board requires little shop space and a modest collection of tools and materials. And with Woodcraft’s cutting board kits, getting to a finished project couldn’t be any easier. Making your own boards also provide plenty of opportunities to practice essential techniques.
You learn how wood behaves, why accuracy is important, glue and clamping strategies, and how to prepare a surface for finishing. That combination makes these small DIY wood projects an ideal place to start your woodworking journey. Best of all, a board is one of those DIY wood projects that almost anyone can use. When you’re done, you have an attractive, practical project to use in your kitchen or give as a gift.
Making cutting boards from wood kits may seem too easy because all you have to do is glue a few boards together. There is more to it if you want to make something nice and grow your skills. Even a simple one presents you with much to think about before you make the first cut. For an overview of the process, this guide to making your first woodworking project is a useful starting point.
Practical Benefits of Starting with a DIY Cutting Board
One of the best things about creating a cutting board is that you can start with what you have and add complexity to your designs as your skills improve. You don’t need a fully equipped cabinet shop or a collection of expensive machinery. In fact, the simplicity of the project is part of what makes it such a valuable learning experience.
A woodworking cutting board doesn’t require a lot of tools
Cutting boards are approachable for someone who is still figuring out which tools deserve a permanent place in the shop. At their simplest, they can be made with a table saw, wood glue, clamps, and sandpaper. A few additional tools can make the work easier and expand your designs, but it’s okay to start small. These projects are also forgiving. You might make several mistakes on your first one, but you’ll learn valuable woodworking lessons without breaking the bank.
You don’t need a big shop to make small beginner woodworking projects
Cutting boards are also well suited to small workspaces. A sturdy table offers enough room for much of the work, and the project itself is easy to move out of the way when you need your space for something else. If you’re new to woodworking, that matters. A project that fits comfortably into your shop is much easier to start, stop, and return to.
Start with cutting board kits, and work up to using your scrap wood
Woodcraft’s wood kits can be a convenient place to start. The stock is selected for you so you can just get started. That doesn’t mean you have to follow the design exactly. You can change the arrangement of the pieces, alter the proportions, or try sawing out a particular shape. Soon, you’ll find yourself looking at offcuts and wondering which of those pieces could become your next board.
To get a complete picture, here’s step-by-step directions for how to make a wood cutting board for your kitchen.
Skill-Building Benefits of Making a Cutting Board
The real value of this project becomes apparent when you look at what you learn while making one. The process teaches several fundamental woodworking lessons, which makes it one of the most useful DIY wood projects for building a foundation in woodworking.
Cutting boards teach precision
If the strips aren’t flat and uniform, gaps will appear when you glue it up. Those gaps will ruin the look of your board and can compromise the integrity of the joint and the cutting board itself. To get perfectly smooth joints, you need to learn how to make precise, square strips.
In the process, you learn to pay attention to straight cuts, consistent dimensions, and how individual pieces fit together before you reach for the glue bottle. As your skills improve, you can move beyond prepared stock and start with rough lumber, which teaches you to dress stock.
Understanding how to master glue-ups
Glue-ups are another fundamental skill that woodworking cutting boards place front and center. You’ll learn how much pressure to apply with your clamps, where to position them, and how to keep the assembly from shifting as you tighten everything down. You also get an early lesson in choosing the right adhesive for the job. For more, our guide to Perfect Flat-Panel Glue-ups covers many of the same fundamentals you’ll use when assembling the board. These skills transfer to furniture, cabinets, workbenches, and countless other projects.
How to prepare finish-ready woodworking surfaces
Making a board teaches you how to prepare a surface because every imperfection will remain visible on the finished piece. You learn to use handheld sanders, how to smooth the surface, remove machining marks and scratches, and work through the grits.
Finishing also introduces you to selecting the appropriate finish for your DIY woodworking projects. In this case, it will come into contact with food. Woodcraft’s selection of food-safe finishes gives you a place to explore the options. And there’s a satisfying payoff when you wipe on the first coat and watch the grain and color come alive.
Wood Selection and Design Fundamentals
Once you have the skills down, cutting boards are excellent small DIY wood projects that help you start thinking like a designer. The material itself becomes part of the project, and the choices you make before cutting can have as much impact on the finished piece as the techniques you use to build it.
Selecting the right wood for the project
Wood selection is one area where a little knowledge goes a long way. A DIY cutting board needs a stable, closed-grain hardwood that is appropriate for food contact. That rules out many of the inexpensive boards a beginner might otherwise grab from a home center or the scrap pile.
For domestic species, maple, walnut, and cherry are go-to choices. Popular exotics include purpleheart, padauk, and bloodwood. This guide to the best woods for cutting boards gives a deeper look at factors such as hardness and grain porosity. An excessively hard wood can be tough on blades, while an open-pored species such as oak presents different concerns for a kitchen application.
Cutting board grain
Grain orientation is another woodworking lesson inherent in making these projects. Face-grain boards use the broad face of the lumber as the cutting surface and provide the most exciting grain patterns. Edge-grain boards orient the edge of the stock toward the top, while end-grain boards expose the ends of the wood fibers. Each construction has different characteristics.
Face-grain boards show knife marks, while end-grain construction is more durable. Edge-grain designs offer a useful middle ground and are a natural place to start for many beginners. Learning how those different grain orientations respond to cutting, glue, sanding, and everyday use extends a better understanding of wood itself.
Making cutting boards teaches you design
One of the most fun parts of making a woodworking cutting board is that there is no reason each one needs to look alike. Every new thing you try opens the possibility of incorporating new tools into your shop, such as bandsaws for curved cuts or routers for templates and profiles.
You can experiment with:
- Different wood species and contrasting colors
- Grain direction and the width of individual strips
- Cutting board templates that offer various shapes and handles
- Router bits, like the juice groove bit, for more than just edge details
A simple board can become a launchpad for developing your sense of proportion and visual balance. Our tips in the Cut-Above Cutting Boards article gives inspiration for pushing the design beyond a basic rectangle.
Cutting Boards Make Great Gifts
Your first successful DIY cutting board may end up in your own kitchen. The next one could become a birthday gift, after that, a housewarming present, and maybe one for the holidays. Before long, you have a practical reason to keep practicing, which is key because repetition is one of the best ways to become a better woodworker.
Upcycling old cutting boards is a fun way to breathe new life into past projects.
Customize your cutting board for the recipient
These handmade projects also allow you to consider the person who will use it. Someone who has limited counter space may appreciate a smaller board that can be pulled out when needed. A serious home cook with a large kitchen might prefer a thicker end-grain board that’s more substantial and can stay on the counter. You’re building with intent.
And if you find that you’ve made more boards than your friends and family can use, sell them.
Make more cutting boards
You don’t have to wait until you have a large shop or a long list of expensive tools to start building your skills. The best small beginner woodworking projects are accessible and give you a reason to make them again. Cutting boards fit that description perfectly and provide a manageable project that can grow alongside your abilities. Start with a simple design when you build your first cutting board, learn from it, and make another. Before long, you may find that the skills you earned on one of the smallest projects in the shop are showing up in everything else you build.
CHAD McCLUNG
Chad is a woodworker with nearly 20 years of experience in woodworking and home improvement, covering these topics as a how-to writer, editor, and photographer. He is the former editor-in-chief of Woodcraft Magazine. When not in the shop, Chad is probably adding to a Blu-ray collection that rivals his tool collection.