Gluing Purpleheart for cutting boards

[Ron]

Finally have an oppurtunity to build some cutting boards this weekend...

I'm planning on combining Hard Maple, Cherry, Walnut, Purpleheart and possibly some ROak and WOak. Have a piece of Padauk I may use as well.

I was really surprised after a few internet searches to see all the various woods used for cutting board. DAGS for 'hardwood of your choice' cutting boards

The real question: I intend to use Titebond II for these, but, will it work well with the very dense Purpleheart or should something like 'Gorilla Glue' be used.

Finally, small gloat, the local Rocklers has S2S Purpleheart $4.00/bf all October.

ThankX, Ron

[max]

I made several purple heart, and Paduak cutting boards 4 or 5 years ago using t2. They are still tight. max

[Steve]

I've used purpleheart in some of the guitar necks I've built, using yellow glue or Luthier's Mercantile's white Luthier's glue. No problems--worked great. I don't think purpleheart is oily like cocobolo.

--Steve

R> Finally have an oppurtunity to build some cutting boards this weekend... >

[SonomaProducts.com]

The Red Oak is way to porous to be used safely for a cutting board, lot's o' places for water and bacteria to hide and grow.

I'd question the White too, even though it has good water related properties relating to rot, I still think it's too porous. I'd honestly worry a bit about the Cherry too but I suppose Walnut is OK.

FYI, the NSF, the folks that certify food handling products for commercial usage, have never qualified any wooden cutting surface other than Hard Maple.

BW

[Chris Friesen]

While this may be true, this doesn't mean it's the only safe species. From some googling, there appears to be little difference in wood types:

"These authors found no differences between wood types (basswood, birch, maple, maple plus walnut)."

"The experiments described have been conducted with more than 10 species of hardwoods...we found essentially no differences among the tested wood species..."

"The scientists purposely contaminated seven species of wood cutting boards and four types of plastic boards with Salmonella, Listeria, and E. coli (all known to produce food poisoning)....They found that 99.9% of the bacteria on the wood boards had died after three minutes..."

[Paul Kierstead]

The three quotes listed below all reference research work performed by D. O. Cliver, sometimes with others. As such, it is misleading to quote three different 'sources', since it is fundamentally a single one; a mono-culture if you will :)

On the upside, he does have a paper entitled "Cutting boards and bacteria--oak vs. Salmonella."

There is a literature review of the topic:

is dry (heh) but pretty interesting. It is useful as it is a survey of a wide variety of authors, hopefully evening out some of the responses. Its conclusions are telling: "...plastic was generally found to be cleaner than wood, unless fat deposits occurred. However, used plastic surfaces were more difficult to clean than used wooden surfaces, especially in the presence of fat deposits. Plastic wears faster than wood, offering openings to foreign contaminants."

There are if, ands and buts of course, so at the minimum you should read the whole conclusion yourself. *My* short version of the conclusion: In a home environment, with lots of drying time and adequate washing, wood will out-perform plastic, but this is far from certain as the studies to date have had serious flaws.

Chris Friesen wrote:

[Steve knight]

it goes fine with yellow glue. no oil at all. but hey it will dull knives faster then other woods (G) I get 8/4 S2S purpleheart for 3.50 a bf every time I buy it (G) Knight-Toolworks

handmade wooden planes

[Chris Friesen]

Bah. That'll teach me to not check the references...

Chris

[Paul Kierstead]

LOL. Aww, I was just pickin' on ya. 99.998% of the lot here would just assert that it was better, or that someone said it was better. At least you tracked down some references.

Incidentally, as a result of all this, I started using a wood cutting board for my meat, since I hated the plastic one (it slides around too easy) which was trashed anyway.