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Comment by xnx | Hacker News Reader

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

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.

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. :)

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