Clark's Cutting Board Oil and Finish

Standard Disclaimer:  I have no affiliation with the manufacturer of these products.  I purchased them with my own money and the Amazon links are provided below as a convenience for the reader; they are not affiliate links and I gain nothing if you buy them.  I just wanted to tell you about a product that I like.  So there.

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It’s the holiday season… and that means shop-made gifts!  One of the items I made this year was a small cutting board from maple and cherry scraps.  When it came time to apply a finish, I decided to try out Clark’s Cutting Board Oil and Clark’s Cutting Board Finish.

Since this cutting board was raw wood, I wanted to soak it with oil before applying a final finish.  That’s where Clark’s Cutting Board Oil—a wonderfully scented mixture of mineral oil, orange oil, and lemon oil—comes in.  Could you make this yourself?  Of course.  Although, I’m fairly certain that buying mineral oil, orange oil, and lemon oil, and then spending the necessary time to get the correct mixture of the three will be more costly than just purchasing Clark’s pre-made oil mixture.  The application process was simple:  I poured some of the oil mixture on the board and rubbed it in with a clean cloth.  I propped the board up on painter’s pyramids and let it soak for a few hours.  When I came back, the majority of the oil had soaked into the wood, so I wiped it down with a clean cloth and applied a second coat.

Now, I could’ve stopped right here.  But, since this cutting board was intended as a gift for mom, I decided to go the extra mile and applied a coat of Clark’s Cutting Board Finish, as well.  This product has the consistency of a paste wax—it’s a mixture of carnauba wax, beeswax, mineral oil, orange oil, and lemon oil—and it gives you the advantage of some additional water resistance when applied on top of a standard oil treatment.  Could you make this yourself?  Of course.  But I personally wouldn’t for all of the same reasons I mentioned earlier.  Applying the finish was, again, a snap:  I rubbed it into the wood in a circular motion with a clean cloth and let it sit.  A few hours later, I came back and buffed the board with a clean cloth.  Done!

So what’s the final verdict?  Well, my cutting board looks great, is fully seasoned, and smells so good that I had to physically stop myself from gnawing on it.  When you buy a pre-made cutting board finish like this, you’re paying for convenience.  If you’re a woodworker who batches out dozens or even hundreds of cutting boards, it’ll be more economical for you to mix your own custom finish.  But for someone like me who only builds cutting boards every once in a great while, a product like this is fantastic.  It’s quick, affordable, works great, and these two bottles will last for years.

Challenge Yourself

“The person who says it cannot be done should not interrupt the person who is doing it.”

— Chinese proverb

I like to run.  It doesn’t matter what the conditions are:  hot, cold, rain, snow, sleet, daytime, nighttime.  There’s nothing better than being alone with your own thoughts in the dark quiet of the early morning and churning out the miles.  While I’m not really a competitive runner, I’m always looking for ways to improve.  Short of the handful of times that I was chased by some angry wild animals, I was disappointed with my average pace times.  I wanted to run faster and, try as I might, I wasn’t seeing much improvement.  That was when I changed the game by challenging myself.  I signed up for some races and set a goal for my finish times.  With a tangible goal set I was able to improve my speed to levels that I would have thought impossible just a year ago.  It wasn’t easy, but working toward a stretch goal instead of just exercising was what I needed to realize significant improvement in my ability. 

Take a look back at your last five woodworking projects.  How would you characterize them?  Are you basically building the same or similar items over and over again, or are you going outside your comfort zone by taking on projects that challenge your abilities?  If you want to improve your skills, you need to stretch your limits.  Build projects that you aren’t sure you’ll be able to finish.  I promise you that nine times out of ten you will finish them and you’ll be amazed at your accomplishment.

The most obvious way to challenge yourself is by taking on a style of project that you’ve never attempted before.  Do you usually build square casework?  Try a sculpted rocker, instead.  Have you mastered built-in bookcases?  Try building a small box.  Channel your inner George Costanza, and do the complete opposite of everything you would normally do.  A second option is to choose a “simple” project with only basic joinery, but take as much care and time with it as you need to execute every step of the build flawlessly.  Don’t settle for anything short of perfection.  Just make sure it’s a small project to avoid driving yourself crazy.

I often see woodworkers advising others to practice new techniques before trying them on a project.  While this advice is sensible and logical, I’ve often found practicing joinery techniques on throw-away scrap wood to be about as exciting as watching boiled linseed oil dry.  Do you want to master that new technique?  Then challenge yourself, grab ahold of that technique, and jump right into a project with it.  When the fate of your project relies on the proper execution of a brand new technique, you’ll execute it with a laser focus and learn to use it in a practical real-world scenario.

Challenging yourself by moving outside of your comfort zone creates an unbeatable learning experience, adds excitement to your life, and can be a whole lot of fun.  Don’t shy away from opportunities to build something that, on it’s surface, looks too difficult or was assigned an arbitrary difficulty rating of “advanced” by a magazine editor.  Jump right in with both feet and when you come out the other side, you’ll have created something that you can truly be proud of.

5 Things About Me That Other Woodworkers Think Are Strange

1. I finish my drawer boxes
The drawers on a well-used piece of furniture lead a hard life; they’re constantly being touched, yanked open, and slammed shut.  Drawers get over-stuffed and items spill inside.  It doesn’t take long for a shiny new drawer to become dull, dingy, and dirty.  Cleaning untreated wood ranges from difficult to nearly impossible, and almost always requires sanding.  A finished drawer box, however, doesn’t scuff up easily, wipes clean with a damp rag, and highlights the joinery with the drawer front.

I finish my drawer boxes with two coats of a 2 lb cut of shellac.  I usually just use SealCoat, but I’ve mixed it myself on occasion, as well.  A 1 lb cut would probably work fine, I’m just used to the 2 lb cut because that is how SealCoat comes out of the can.  Shellac is easy to apply and completely odorless when dry.  I never use an oil-based finish inside of a box or a drawer because the smell from the finish will never dissipate and will permeate everything that’s stored inside.

2.  I’m extremely casual about the calibration of my machines
When I bought my Unisaw in 2006, I put it together, calibrated it, and I haven’t thought about it since.  The only time I check any setting on it is when I reset the blade back to 90 degrees.  Table flatness?  Arbor runout?  I’ve never checked either of those and it hasn’t impacted my work in any way.  The same goes for my bandsaw, jointer, and planer.  In general, I think power tool users obsess over machine calibration way too much.  I think the difference for me is that I don’t expect a finished surface right off the machine.  I will be working those surfaces with hand tools after I make my cuts anyway, so they really don’t need to be perfect to a thousandth of an inch.

3.  I got rid of my miter saw and I don’t miss it
Okay, I’ll admit that my miter saw was a crappy 10 inch Craftsman, so it wasn’t that hard to give up.  I originally bought the saw for trim carpentry tasks such as installing baseboard, etc.  It worked fine for this purpose, but when I tried to incorporate it into my furniture-building workflow, I quickly learned that it could not be trusted for accurate joinery cuts.  With joinery out of the question, I used it mainly for breaking down rough stock.  After awhile, though, I realized that bringing heavy planks of lumber to the tool was much more difficult that bringing a light hand-held tool to the wood.  At that point, I started using my jig saw for rough stock breakdown.  Now that I’ve been doing that for a few years, I’m thinking about just buying a vintage crosscut saw instead so I don’t have to mess around with the noise and mess of a power tool for such a rough task.  Eventually, the motor in my tiny Craftsman miter saw burned out.  I was using it so infrequently at that point, though, that I’ve never felt compelled to buy a new one.

4.  I hate jigs
Some woodworkers love building jigs.  I’ve seen jigs that took days to construct and were prettier than some of my finished furniture projects.  I’m not that kind of woodworker.  When I’m in the shop, I want to be building my project, not a jig to use on the project.  I have little patience for planning and constructing jigs, so mine often end up looking like a deranged caveman built it with a rock and some sticks.  As long as they work, right?

5.  I’m apathetic about the Woodworking in America conference
It seems like the year is broken into three phases: the lead-up to Woodworking in America, the actual Woodworking in America conference, and then the flood of blog posts describing what happened at Woodworking in America.  With some of the biggest names in the woodworking world presenting at the conference each year, I can understand why people get excited about attending.  In recent years, though, it seems like Woodworking in America has become a glorified social gathering.  The talk online is more about the meet ups and parties after hours than the conference itself.  It sounds like fun, but I could never justify the cost and time of traveling across the country for that.  So, every year I skim past all of the WIA coverage with a shrug and a “meh.”

Sticks and Stones

“Putting labels on others creates a black hole of disregard where judgment thrives and schisms deepen.”

— David W. Earle

    No one would ever accuse me of being an extrovert, but occasionally I run into a fellow woodworker at a social gathering.  This is usually a great experience, but I recently had a conversation that had me looking for the exit.

    “So, what kind of woodworking do you do?”  The man didn’t look at me when he asked the question.  Instead, he kept his eyes fixed on his drink, which he swirled causing the ice cubes to clink.
    “Flatwork.  I’ve been building a lot of furniture in a modern shaker style, lately.  How about you?”
    “Oh!” he said, his eyes growing wide, almost as if he just realized I was standing next to him. “I’m a Norm-anderthal with an occasional Mayan-breakdancer mixed in.”
    I blinked.  He was saying English words, but they were not connected in any way that I recognized.  “I’m sorry… did you say, ‘Norm-anderthal?’”
    “Oh, yeah!  That means I’m strictly a power tool user, but I’ll only work with vintage machines.”
    “Is that a real term?  I’ve never heard that before.”
    “Of course.  Everyone is using that term lately.”
    “Who is ‘everyone?’”
    “You know… the forums.”
    “Which forums?”
    “THE forums.”
    I sighed.  “Fine, fine. What’s a ‘Mayan-breakdancer?’”
    He snorted and a few drops of his drink dripped on my shoes from his incessant swirling. “Boy, you must be a real newbie!  A Mayan-breakdancer is a small project that I build using only vintage hand tools from the ancient Mayan empire while wearing clothing from the 1980’s.”
     “Heh heh.  Yeah.  I must be a real ‘newbie.’”
     “Any way, it sounds like you like to use both hand tools and power tools.  Would you say you’re more of a hybrid woodworker or a blended woodworker?"
    “Errr… are those different?”
    “Oh, definitely!  A hybrid woodworker is someone who primarily uses power tools, but mixes in hand tools sometimes.  A blended woodworker is someone who uses hand tools primarily, but mixes in power tools sometimes.”
    “Huh.  I guess this is more complicated than I thought.  What do you call someone that uses power tools and hand tools equally with no real preference?”
    “What?” He rolled his eyes. “Nobody does that.”  His phone rang, and he held up a finger at me as he turned around to take the call.  While his back was turned, I slipped away.

    I don’t like to assign labels to woodworkers.  Sure, sometimes there’s no choice; if you want to discuss a particular topic, it’s best to name it so everyone has the proper frame of reference.  When you step back and look at the overall population, however, woodworkers are a very small percentage.  We’re a tiny niche group that insists on sub-dividing itself into even smaller niche groups.  These small groups then become cliques that either close themselves off from the greater community or outright go to war with other cliques on the internet.  This might be human nature since it’s common in all social groups, but that doesn’t mean it’s positive.

    I rarely improve my skills by limiting my interactions to a small group of people that do things exactly the same way that I do.  Every breakthrough that I’ve ever experienced came after talking with or reading about someone that approaches the craft from a different direction.  I need to surround myself with unfamiliar ideas and methods to spark my own creativity.  The Norm-anderthals could learn a thing or two from the blended woodworkers.  And I’m sure the hybrid woodworkers could find some great sparks by talking with the Mayan-breakdancers.  Well, maybe not… unless they’re looking for a good deal on parachute pants.

    The online debates over which group represents the more “traditional” woodworkers or the more “skilled” woodworkers or whatever people are arguing over these days need to stop.  It doesn’t matter what tool you use to accomplish a task.  The fact that you’re building things made out of wood is enough.  So put the label maker away and get back to work.

    Oh, and I guess it’s entirely possible that I made up that entire conversation.  Then again, maybe not.

Failure Is The Only Option

“If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, again. Then quit. No use being a damn fool about it.”

— W.C. Fields

The year was 2002:  MTV showed us that in real life Ozzy Osbourne is actually more like your 95-year-old grandmother than the Prince of Darkness, people who couldn’t be bothered to read the books finally found out what was hiding in the Chamber of Secrets, and Whitney Houston reminded us all that crack is, indeed, whack.  In the midst of this pop culture hurricane, I attempted to build my first furniture project and failed miserably.

I wanted to build a blanket chest that would be used initially as a toy box.  I found a picture of one that I liked, and it seemed simple enough, so I headed down to my local big box store and bought some S4S hard maple.  I owned no woodworking tools beyond a few light duty f-style clamps and a circular saw at this point, so while I was at the store I also purchased a new tool:  a biscuit joiner.  My first (and last, as it turned out) step on this project was to glue up the panels for the sides and top.  I laid out my boards and used the biscuit joiner to cut slots in all the edges.  At the time, I wasn’t totally clear on why I needed to do this, but that’s what Norm did, so I figured it must be the right course of action.  I slathered on some glue, clamped up my panels, and let them cook overnight.

As you can probably imagine, when I removed the clamps the following day, I was disappointed in the results.  Maybe disappointed isn’t the right word.  Distraught is probably more accurate.  My panels were noticeably wavy instead of flat, there were gaps in my joints, there was too much glue squeeze out to clean off without damaging the wood, and, despite using dozens of freaking biscuits, the joints were misaligned.  I was beset by issues that I had neither the knowledge, skillset, nor tooling to correct.

So I quit woodworking and never looked back, right?  Wrong!  I tried again with a less ambitious project and succeeded due to all the lessons I learned in my first aborted attempt.  What could I have possibly learned from this disaster?  I learned that all the boards in a glue-up must be flat for the panel to be flat, you can’t assume lumber marked as S4S will be true, you need to joint edges to get a seamless glue line, you have to remove the glue squeeze out before it fully hardens, and that biscuits aren’t really needed for alignment except in special circumstances.  Gluing up a panel is perhaps one of the most fundamental skills that a woodworker needs to learn, and the lessons I took away from my first attempt served me well on subsequent projects.

Failing isn’t a bad thing; failure is what makes you better.  Practicing a skill is exactly the same as exercising:  when you lift weights, you cause small amounts of damage to the muscle causing your body to build additional muscle tissue for repairs, which makes you get stronger.   Likewise, when you make mistakes in your woodworking, you naturally adapt your techniques, which leads to success in future attempts.  I like to think that I have a library of previous mistakes and failures to draw upon whenever I take on a new project.  If you want to become a better woodworker, just remember that the only practical difference between a master and his apprentice are the number of mistakes each person has accumulated in their experience library.  Now go make something and start building a library of your own.