Home Improvement:
End Result
The functionality of a substantial end-grain countertop somewhere is really pretty nice. Slicing and chopping feels more sure and the knife marks pretty much disappear if the block is kept oiled like a cutting board. On the other hand, glasses with cold liquids leave water rings and regular oiling is more maintenance than granite.
We had a few trees cut down on the property and
noticed that two of them were maple and in decent
shape. I put some white paint on the ends within a
few days to slow the drying and checking that would
otherwise naturally occur.
Butcherblock from
My Own Tree
I’ll never do this again...
As usual, it starts with an instructional book - this
one a bible of wood. Armed with the knowledge that
a tree can be slabbed, dried and turned into
something useful, its just a matter of having a not-
completely-rotten hardwood tree need to be cut
down for whatever reason.
These pinching tow hooks were useful to drag the
tree up the driveway.
And then each pass will be parallel to the top at
whatever thickness is desired. I used roughly 2”
thick slabs for this countertop.
I have no idea why I took no pictures of the many
stages of milling, gluing long strips of maple
together, cutting them into short lengths and rotating
into position, and re-gluing.
We start off getting a reference flat top...
I hated every part of this. The amount of waste
filled entire garbage bags of sawdust.
It kills me that I have so few pictures in this section. At every stage, I wasn’t sure it was going to come out good
enough and many days I’m still not sure that I like the look. It takes a tremendous amount of wood to make an
endgrain anything. Wood doesn’t like to be worked across the ends of the grain and so getting things flat is time
consuming. At a couple of inches thick, endgrain surfaces can move at different rates (and the amount of wood
movement is unbelievable), making the entire surface dish concave or convex like some giant wooden barometer.
The chainsaw in the foreground is outfitted with the
“Alaskan Saw Mill”, which is guide that allows you to
slab fairly large logs
