Cutting board (bored?)

If I do say so myself, here's a great-looking cutting board that will fit on top of the sink!  Along with plywood joining and some other little prep projects, things like this help make progress while I'm waiting for the trailer frame to get finished:

Here's the bottom.  Those feet are getting tough little rare-earth magnets glued into them so the board will snap onto the rim of the sink or any iron or steel surface.  Interestingly, it turned out that the sink is fairly non-magnetic, so there was little point.  A couple of rubber bumpers should fix it right up:

This fine looking beast is made of maple and cherry.  It wasn't too difficult to rip it up, glue it, and sand it smooth.  I expected to need the services of a friend's planer, but a belt sander and an orbital sander did the job just fine.  In retrospect, I might not round the corners like that again, but it looks fine as is.  Mineral oil makes a nice-looking and non-toxic finish.

It's really a strange thing to do to spend loads of time sanding and finishing something only to cut away at it with knives.  But it's definitely not the strangest thing we do as a species.

This post will have a slight "publish delay", because I made another two of these for Terri's birthday (I'll be damned if we're going to have a nicer cutting board in the trailer than in the house), and it's all a huge international secret.

Fin (2 3/4) knows this item as a "special surprise" because I knew he'd run straight upstairs and blab the whole secret right away.  There were lots of conversations like this:

  - "Mommy!  We have a special surprise for you!"

  - "Really?  What is it?"

  - (looking concerned, like she's gone thick in the head) "It's a special surprise."

  - * long silence *

We'll teach him the real name someday.  Finished on the 26th of Nov, to be published after the 13th of Dec.