Full disclosure, I completely stole this idea.
I’ve mentioned Dave Fisher’s work before. I’ve never met or spoke to him, but in the green wood/bowl carving world, he’s kind of a big deal. I’ve read through his blog three times and learned several things each time.
My wife needed a small gift for a friend and I thought of this serving board. While I lack Mr. Fisher’s skill with an adze and a gouge, I figured I could still wind up with something nice.
I had this 2″ thick piece of cypress laying around.
After cutting around some knots and cracks, I still had a decent sized workpiece.
A smoothing plane and card scraper took care of the saw marks from the mill and cleaned up the top.
I’ve written about my fondness for greenwood working and sloyd before, but I took a few power tool shortcuts on this one. After marking out the profile and the radius for the ends, I roughed out the shape on the bandsaw.
One of my favorite details from Dave Fisher’s board was the textured underside, so I used a carving gouge to pare away the marks from the bandsaw. I also cleared out a little material from the middle of each runner on the underside to give the board four feet.
After texturing the bottom, I planed and scraped the edges. Then, all of the corners, top and bottom, were chamfered.
A spokeshave worked well on the long straight corners, but a carving knife was the right tool for the curves around the feet, and on the end grain.
I used a block plane to shave down a couple of the feet until the board sat flat on my workbench without rocking.
The edge and end grain needed a light sanding, but the top and bottom were left straight from the tools.
Before I finished, I carved a spreader out of a pecan off-cut to go with the serving board (again, I cheated and used the bandsaw to rough it out). Both pieces received four coats of butcher block finish.
The finished board was roughly 5″x14″. According to my oldest son, it looks like a sushi table.
I’m not real sure what to make of that…
