Cutting Board Designer | Hacker News Reader

Cutting Board Designer

cuttingboarddesigner.com

116 pointsbookofjoe75 comments

I love it, I enjoyed playing with different designs, I especially liked the random button.

Also, I learned that the chevron pattern with rotation set to 90 degrees is out of my price range, as the materials would cost $2,281,620,945,495,674,000,000,000,000,000,000.00 .

I managed to find a couple in my price range, as low as $-0.80 each (free with a rebate of 80 cents) - once you've messed with it a few times, there appear to be some bugs with the math as you might of noticed.

If you can settle for 269.99 degrees (270 exactly seems to mess up the formatting of the page) the price goes into the negative hundreds of millions of dollars and you can make some serious bank building cutting boards.

Unfortunately, if you build one every microsecond, you still won't be able to afford a 90 degree chevron board within 250 billion years.

A deference to chevron price, so to speak.

Neat idea.

Board makers, please make 11.5”x16.5” boards of whatever type. Despite use of US units, this is a universal size - it will fit in the bottom of a half-sheet pan (13”x18” top dimensions with sides tapering to bottom) which is AIUI an international standard. Standard size kitchen towel on counter, pan on towel, board in pan to catch any juices that spill off. Works best if board has feet to elevate it a bit and catch more volume.

Obviously useful for large roasts, but also superb for watermelon. Also a good size for standalone use, but the sheet pan method really helps. If you buy one fancy-finished sheet pan, it looks good enough to use at the table for service and keeps things clean.

Cool tool. Very surprised there isn't a "Buy" button. Would be a natural and welcome addition.

If you come up with a pattern you want, send me a ping (email in profile, and a gallery of example work) - I do customs.

Heads up, going to your root domain leads to an error. That might have been intentional, but figured I’d share.

You boards are really cool.

Your cube board is beautiful.

Only very large commercial cutting board makers would be able to accommodate custom design orders from a tool like this. It would have to be extremely constrained in terms of the tools available to the ship (like the maximum capacity of sanders), availability of space and clamps, and most importantly availability of appropriate wood.

Or people with a reasonable CNC machine (even prosumer grade), that takes the time to make some setup templates.

I wish that were the case, but there's not much that can be automated with a CNC in the production of these board patterns (I've tried, a lot). The parts that can be aren't related to actually making the pattern itself: flattening, handhold routing, and the juice groove.

There are some generic-ish jigs that a CNC and 3D printer help with, but those don't tend to change with board pattern.

Economies of scale would be realized by making lots of the same board, but then you're not doing custom one-offs.

CNC would not make much easier unless you were also doing inlays. For straight repeated cuts a table saw would be 100x faster.

Thinking about it a bit more, yeah I reckon you're probably right. :)

To be clear, their listed costs are material costs, not labor costs.

Cutting boards are labor intensive and unless you can make dozens or hundreds of identical ones will never be profitable. The amount of work setting up different cuts, gluing repeatedly, sanding and sanding and sanding.....it's exhausting. Cutting boards are one of my favorite woodworking projects, but I make batches of them as gifts once every few years - which is exactly as long as it takes me to forget how much labor goes into them.

Totally. I've seen a few dozen TikTok videos of the steps involved in making similar cutting boards. There still might be some takers for a custom cutting board for $450.

Once you have a drum sander the amount of hand sanding for cutting boards goes way, way down.

You have to be building a lot of big flat things to justify the floor space a drum sander takes up. If you already have one, sure, use it, but floor space is by far the most expensive thing in most shops.

The power and dust collection requirements tend to be getting towards the bigger side of things for a drum sander as well. Most truly useful sizes are at least 240V if not three-phase.

I think that's an exaggeration, especially for cutting boards. Unlike thickness planers, most drum sanders have an open frame. Even the smallest 16" units can handle projects that are 30" wide. And these units work perfectly fine off 115V.

You can crank out cutting boards like that with not much more than a bunch of clamps, a small drum sander, a miter saw, and a good vacuum cleaner - garage-friendly and under $2,000. The issue is the hours of manual labor you have to put into this, especially since people are not used to paying hundreds of dollars for a decorative cutting board.

There are custom cutting board businesses out there, but they just use a CNC mill to cut personalized shapes or messages in common stock. That's a larger capital investment but far less manual work.

It's a huge exaggeration. My Supermax 19-38 has helped me produce cutting boards larger than any normal person would want and it's a 120v machine. It does require dust collection but so does a table saw, planer and jointer, which are other machines you'll need to make a decent cutting board.

Now drum sanders do take up space (though mine is on wheels and can roll to the side when not in use), and aren't the easiest machines to use and maintain. But when it comes to cutting boards it vastly reduces the labor. Most of the time is just waiting for the glue to dry.

I love the idea of a cool cutting board and have myself made a few of them, but they are a consumable kitchen tool and don't last long with regular use unless you are really dainty with them. I use my cutting boards a lot so I tend to save the fancy boards for presentation and serving and for actual daily use I make simple side grain domestic wood (maple, cherry, or birch) boards that I can make quickly and run through my planer when they get smelly, stained, or overly damaged. Eventually they get too thin and I make a new one.

I cook 4-5 days a week every week and have never worn through a quality cutting board. Cheap plastic ones will die but good quality wood has lasted well for me. Epicurean also makes a composite board which has lasted many years for me 26th regular use.

I would guess that you are using a hard (sugar) maple cutting board or something similar. I prefer softer woods such as big leaf maple, cherry or birch in order to preserve my knife edge.

I agree that you'll never wear through a normal wood cutting board in normal use.

But you will scratch the surface immediately, and you should be cleaning it aggressively, so you gotta keep that in mind before putting days or weeks into making a beautifully polished, highly detailed work of art.

If you're bored, and want to invest about $3k in tools and dust collection, cutting boards are a great project! (=

Standard Board - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYBg-L3R9g8

Chaos Board - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=is7Qn5JuSV4

Restoring Butcher Block Table - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8R6Bmc3ztPg

If you are bored and want to invest less that £100 in a second hand smoothing plane and a saw you can still make cutting boards!

Power tools are easier to learn to use, are more expensive, noisier, more dangerous, and turn wood into dust. Hand tools are more physically demanding, take up little space, are a pleasure to use, are quiet, and turn wood into lovely long shavings and coarse dust that falls onto the floor.

I was a professional woodworker for a decade, I rarely use power tools now if I can help it

Translation for fellow British readers: chopping board for use in the kitchen :)

genuine question: does "cutting board" mean something else? it seems like a reasonably unambiguous term so I'm curious what else it might refer to.

As a Brit the first thing I imagined was one of those large, thin plastic boards, usually green, with a grid of various measurements and angles printed on them, used for cutting fabric for sewing patterns.

In the US those are usually called "self-healing cutting mats" made of PVC (indeed, a plastic).

In the US, I have some "cutting boards" made from flexible self-healing plastic.

To add confusion: These are for kitchen use.

To add more confusion: They were purchased from Aldi.

Me too - I think 'cutting' implies a level of precision that 'chopping' doesn't. After all, I don't think even Michelin-star restaurants require that finely-sliced carrots!

"Chopping" is a way of cutting.

I really like the simplicity of the UI, BOM, costing, the ability for the users to customize and ultimately the build steps itself(with images!). Myself worked on this idea of generational grid patterns, I am able to comprehend the design choices to make this an easy tool for every normal user. Kudos for making it simple

From the About page:

"The Cutting Board Designer does not support IE because I'm not at work and I don't have to "

Yeah, that's valid.

Having said that, it's using Material UI which has only just committed PRs to remove IE support in a yet to be released version, so this probably works with IE even if the author doesn't intend to support it.

Just an observation that the open source ecosystem has been very patient with Microsoft – no obligation on anyone to support anything that doesn't suit them!

Fun idea. One thing I don't love is there's heavy emphasis on 4 pieces coming together at a single point with almost all of the designs. It looks nice, but:

a)That's a really weak point that will probably be the first point of failure.

b)It's way more difficult to get that to line up properly in the real world (front and back, as the wood isn't always perfectly square) and will have a lot more obvious imperfections in the design.

I do quite a few cutting boards (mostly to use up scrap wood), and random patterns or a simple running bond hold up way better.

Most of these designs are nice display pieces, but will not hold up well to true kitchen use.

Pretty cool. It immediately becomes apparent when looking at the build steps that the best way to make cutting boards is en masse. Building one is not significantly less work than building 10.

I am assuming you are not a woodworker? There are physical constraints that make it really hard to scale like that. Whether it's clamps, glue drying time, planer capacity, shop space etc. You also don't get the same economies of scale when you start to get to the end of the process, eg sanding, routing edges/ blood groves/handles, applying finish, etc.

I am assuming you are not a woodworker?

Of course it's way easier. You can fit ten cutting boards on one set of bar clamps. Adjusting the planer takes longer than sending one board through. You only have to change sanding paper 3 times instead of 3N. You only have to change your router bits twice instead of 2N. You only use one rag per finish pass.

The number of clamps you need for the first (long grain) glue ups depends on the number of lineal feet you are gluing up. How are you using the same set of clamps for the ten boards that would suffice for one board? All of the examples I saw are end grain cutting boards. So for the final glue up you need one complete set of clamps for each board. So you are either taking ten times as long to do that glue up or you need 10x clamps.

Side note: what planer are you using that sending work through is quicker than adjusting the height? Every planer I have ever used takes less than 5 seconds to adjust the height.

Make it twice as wide -- instead of 16x120 it's 32x60. Half as many clamps opened twice as wide. Repeat as necessary. Goes for every step.

It only takes four seconds for a board to go through mine. Takes much longer to crank the wheel down from the 5" I had it at before.

You both have a point. Commercially, make ten boards because efficiency equals money. For pleasure, do it one at a time because that’s more fun than an assembly line.

I’m not a woodworker most of the time, but I am building a 35 foot privacy fence at my house from rough redwood that I have to prepare myself (flattening, ripping, etc), and I would rather die than prepare the wood for more than one section of the fence at a time. I like doing it the hard way where I just do a bit at a time because it’s more enjoyable. If this were a job, I would certainly plane everything then cut everything then oil everything then drill all the holes then cut down the boards then I would bring that onsite to assemble it in a few days. Instead it’s going to take three months.

Wow, you have a 32 inch planer? That's awesome. That has to be an industrial planer? The brands I am familiar with, Powermatic/Laguna/etc, do not even make one that big.

If your 32 inch planer processes 5 feet in 4 seconds? That's 75 feet per minute! What kind of dust collection do you have?

He didn't say he had a 32 inch planer. You can glue two separate 16 inch sets of boards side by side in one set of clamps. You don't have to glue them together!

Another economy of scale for clamping is to put everything into a clamp rack, rather than onto your assembly table in parallel clamps https://www.jamesltaylor.com/product/8-panel-clamp-79f-8-pc/

Making large batches of the same board is absolutely faster; I'm having a hard time thinking of a single counterexample. I estimate each additional board I make is only 10% more work than the time to make a single.

Best example I've got is an 3D cubes design. Took me a week to make one of them, took me a week and a half to make 12, with less wastage due to division remainders.

Sanding, edge routing, handles - all goes so much faster when I only have to set up the drum sander once, the CNC once, each grit on the the palm sander once...

As for clamps, those certainly are not the limiting factor. Harbor Freight clamps are less than $10, can be exchanged no questions asked if (when) they break, and you can never have enough of them anyways.

> Building one is not significantly less work than building 10.

One of the more disappointing things about being a programmer-woodworker is that as a programmer, as soon as I've got something that works right once it's no effort at all to chuck a loop around it to repeat it a bunch of times.

In woodworking, on the other hand? Putting in 20 screws takes almost twice as long as putting in 10.

Could you use long strips as the individual pieces and soak each strip in stain for a progressively longer amount of time to create a gradient effect in the final product?

You really don’t want to seal a cutting board with anything other than mineral oil and beeswax. Stain is pretty toxic - wouldn’t want that to leach into your food.

Stain is almost always for coloring, not finishing (not clear if you were implying otherwise). There are products marketed as "stain" which are made from linseed oil and beeswax, but they really only darken the wood a little. General Finishes sells a "food safe, oil-and-urethane-based" stain for turned wooden bowls, it says it's low-VOC and PFAS-free. Personally, I love the aesthetic of food-safe linseed or other nut/seed oils, and simply use wood of the color I desire.

You'd be better off selecting pieces of wood that are compatible with each other and have natural color variation, then order them from dark to light to achieve a gradient. Or change the width of strips to create a "dithering" effect. You certainly don't want to use stain on a food-grade surface.

Not exactly what you're asking for but sand-shading is done over short distances to get gradients in marquetry and inlay work. Holly is a popular wood for the technique.

Looks interesting. Wonder if there would be an easy way to add support for non-rectangular cutting boards?

Maybe some kind of bitmask file upload?

I have been dreaming of site like this for planning tile layouts, so cool!

Just tiled a backsplash two days ago. The problem with tile is that on most tile, the glaze at the manufactured edges looks different from the glaze on a cut edge. It sort of has a pillowed look at the manufactured edges but it is a hard edge when you cut it.

Also: cutting tile is a lot more tedious than cutting wood. And it's definitely messier.

If you resign yourself to manufactured shapes for the bulk of your work, you're now kind of limited to the shapes and sizes you can buy. And then you have to hope that the sizes accommodate the size grout lines you want to use.

That said, if someone out there starts making actual Penrose tiles in the next couple of years, I'll buy some when I do our entryway. They've got time to tool up. It'll be at least that long before I'm willing to do another tiling project.

Ikea APTITLIG £3, thats the one for me.

Treat yourself, stranger.

I feel like a dunce just saying "wow very cool", but sometimes that's all I've got. Really fun tool. I plan on using it.

"Random" should have some sanity checking, I doubt anyone can make a board with thousands of stripes with micron thickness with twenty different woods. Looks good though.

End grain boards, while they may look nice, don't seem to be a good idea:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QdXvBtN3iE&t=4m44s

Go with edge grain.

Also: lean towards teak wood. It has a resin that naturally repels moisture (it's why it was used on boats for so long (until man-made material became popular)).

There are also pros and cons to using wood versus plastic:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GETfxYaBj3w

(Sanitation seems to be a non-issue, though if you have a dish washer, plastic may be more convenient.)

Do all these boards use glue to hold the different types of wood together?

I have never seen a cutting board that did not use glue for the lamination.

Yes, commonly used Titebond II and III are both food-safe.

Cutting Board Designer in Strips mode with “flip alternating rows” turned off works acceptably for designing edge grain, although the material estimations are off. So I guess all I use it for is visualizing different strip widths and overall size

While teak is an awesome material it's also one of those hardwoods that's hard to source ethically (if you care about it). It's not as bad as the endangered hardwoods that are borderline impossible to source outside of personally salvaging it, but it's not great.

> While teak is an awesome material it's also one of those hardwoods that's hard to source ethically (if you care about it).

The recommended wood-based product is from Teakhuas, who have a bunch of information on their sourcing:

* https://teakhaus.com/blogs/why-teakhaus/tagged/certification...

America's Test Kitchen is wrong. End grain is way better. They wear better as you aren't cross cutting the fibers of the wood. Sure they absorb more oil... So? I have both end grain and edge grain cutting boards.

The point is that the edge grain cutting board absorbs less liquid, period. You'd like your board to not absorb blood from meat too much while you are cutting it.

As for strength and hardness, for the vast majority of people the difference will be negligible thanks to modern glues. Maybe you'll notice that your knives won't dull as fast with edge grain over end grain.

About the only people it would really matter for are if you need an actual butcher block which is going to be used for chopping continuously for 8 hours every day (do they even use them in commercial facilities still?). However, a genuine butcher block is a very different beast. If you find one it looks like it is made up of a hardwood (like maple) in 1x4ish lumber about 6 to 12 inches long. The rows are dovetailed in one direction and generally held together by a threaded rod in the other since hide glues sucked.

In my experience, modern edge gain boards are a marketing optimization to hide crappy wood. You can use smaller wood chunks and use a lot more glue.

> America's Test Kitchen is wrong. End grain is way better.

ATK is basically a commercial kitchen that does a lot of volume with dozens of chefs/cooks. They've been recommending edge grain for at least a decade:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eiCNB0fId0U

I'm going to lean towards trusting their review process—that probably wails on these boards more than I ever will—more than anecdata.

> They wear better as you aren't cross cutting the fibers of the wood.

They did wear-testing with the help of Autodesk and a robotic arm (see 3m14s) that went at the boards thousands of times. This is in addition to the daily use they probably get at ATK.

If there is a wearing difference is, I doubt I'll hit volumes high enough for it to matter as a home cook.

Take a look at the block a butcher uses? They cut a lot more cutting than any chef... and they are end grain

> Take a look at the block a butcher uses?

LOL: my (late) uncle was a meat cutter and owned a butcher shop for many years: most of his surfaces were metal and plastic for easier cleaning.

> They cut a lot more cutting than any chef... and they are end grain

What butcher does and what a chef does are different things. Chefs do slicing, chiffonade, julienning, dicing, and chopping (vertical movements). Butchers do a lot quartering, deboning, chopping, and filleting (many more horizontal).

Further, if you look at a actual butcher blocks, you'll see that they were not tiny little cutting boards, but actual table/furniture. And the practical reason why they were what we now call 'end grain' is because they were a bunch of long pieces of lumber put together with some feet attached:

* https://archersantiques.ca/product/antique-butcher-block-193...

* https://antiquebutcherblocks.com/product-tag/historic-butche...

The tiny (3" in height) little things that are called "butcher block" nowadays are in the style of the giant tables of yore, but the fact they just happen to have a check board pattern is a aesthetic affectation to mimic that 'real' items of the past. Which is why splitting is probably a much more common occurrence as they're much less surface area for glue between the pieces, so 'moisture shifting' is more likely—which is why maintenance is much more important and needs to be done more often.

But feel free to get whatever: if you want to use up more oil in the regular maintenance of your cutting board (and having to do maintenance more often), I'm not going to stop you.

Yet butcher blocks used end grain for centuries!

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