I have finished the knife drawer for my mom. The drawer is made out of red oak. The top is hard maple. The cutting board is removable. The drawer is stained with 2 coats of polyurethane on it. The top is stained with mineral oil.
Can anyone offer me some critique? Be gentle it is my first real project and dont with an old 99 dollar delta bench top saw and a 99 dollar router and table. (Yyobi).
Looks great! Don't let the peer pressure of this group keep you from doing good work with the tools you have. I've seen great work from cheap tools, and poor work from expensive tools. The point of hobbyist woodworking is to have fun with the process, and if you learn something along the way, and you get something useable at the end, you're good. Keep it up, have fun, experiment, learn from your mistakes and your successes. One question on your project - are there going to be dividers in the drawer to keep the knives from dinging each other up? And one nitpick about your post - you say it's "stained" with poly and mineral oil - staining generally refers to adding pigment/color to your workpiece, while finishing is the more general term for adding a protective coat of poly/varnish/lacquer/shellac/oil/etc. Did you stain the wood also, or just add the colorless finish? It looks like the red oak is stained and the maple isn't, but you don't specify. I'm not sure I like that particular color on red oak, but I do like the contrast with the maple. It does look like it matches the cabinets in the background, so if that's your goal, good job. The real question is, do you like it? What would you do differently next time? I'm sure your mom will love it. Keep it up, Andy
See? It wasn't all that hard, was it? It looks good, stryped.
As someone suggested, an insert in the drawer to keep knives in place so they don't get dinged up would be nice. An easy way...
glue up solid wood at least 3/4" thick so you have a piece that will just fit in the drawer
using the saw, cut parallel groves in it but don't cut all the way through. Groove depth/spacing depends on the blades that will be sitting in the groves.
Yes, I stained the red oak and then put two coats of polyurethane on top of it. The stain actually was the same stain used to stain my mom's cabinets and it just so happend to match my cabinets here.
What about the color do you not like? What typically is the color red oak is stained with?
I read and learned on this group that you have to use a food safe finish for a cutting board. So I used mineral oil. (It is all I had and the local hardware store did not sell any food safe finishes.)
I did use a router mounted in a table. It is a cheap ryobi. I wish I had a better table saw and a jointer.
First, it doesn't matter what I think of the color - it matches your mom's kitchen, and if that's the color she picked, then it's the perfect color. Personally, I usually prefer clear finishes without stain, or a lighter colored stain. Part of the reason I like working wood is to enjoy and show off it's natural beauty, and stain is often not necessary for that. I think red oak looks particularly good with orange shellac and no other color, but I don't particularly like orange shellac on white oak. Oh, well.
First, just about any finish is theoretically food-safe once it polymerizes, but you don't want a finish that hardens on a cutting board, or else you will cut through it and chip it up. That's one of the reasons mineral oil is good - it doesn't polymerize, but it doesn't go rancid like some cooking oils. You'll probably need to re-apply more mineral oil every once in a while when the board starts looking dry.
I was thinking of something like the picture at
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it doesn't need to be nearly this complicated. Just a couple boards running perpendicular to the drawer, with some slits so the knives rest securely with the blade facing down. Google knife drawer if you want some more inspiration.
Here are a couple. More complicated than I suggested but the idea is the same. The top tier holds short knives, bottom one longer knives. The wood is poplar, knife handles lignum vitae.
Looks great. Before you go out and buy more expensive power tools try using some hand tools. Dovetailing a drawer is a good skill to learn.Or MT joints with a chisel and saw.
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