Is it worth refinishing an end grain board?

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Nemo

Nemo

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A question for the woodworkers:

I have a high 3 year old end grain board. It is high quality and made of Jarrah, an Australian hardwood with middling hardness (8.5 kn or ~2000 lbs). It is 60mm (2.4") thick and one sided (it has feet on the other side).

The board is oiled (liquid parrafin BP) and treated with board butter (parrafin with bees wax) regularly. It sees a fair bit of use in a home (not professional) environment. The board still works fine (and the underlying board is solid, with no cracks) but the centre of the cutting surface is now showing some wear. It doesn't hold a polish like it used to and needs care more often.

I was toying with the idea of using coarse (40 grit) sandpaper to take the top mm or so off, followed by a progession to around 400 grit. I am conscious that the oil in the wood will mean that the sandpaper will clog pretty quickly.

Is this worth doing or too much effort? Would a power sander (orbital or belt?) Be a better idea?

Are there any other options (using a thicknesser, planing?)

Can I get a carpenter to do this quickly and easily or is it just going to be a difficult job?
 
Well, we are more less in the same boat, just mine is smaller. My super cool looking board has bends to it (most likely a side effect of the wavy pattern that looks so awesome) and would need 1-2 mm removed from the surface to get it flat. I have not oiled it for a long tome so that it would not clog some surface sander too bad, but I am not sure whether that would be the right way to go.
 
There was a recent thread about doing this sort of repair to a built in table which decently covered the options.

It's possible to use a surface planer, though the end grain is murder on the blades/knives on the machine. Someone might be willing to use an indexed, spiral head version to plane some thickness off, but it's still a really hard use for the tool. A hand plane or scraper might be the better approach.

If you try sandpaper, I'd go really aggressive with the grit to start (ie as low a number as possible) and assume you're going to burn through paper in a hurry. I don't know if there's any means to de-grease the board before trying the sandpaper approach... but might be worth a try.

If you're super handy, you could build a router sled and plane the board using that approach. I'd go this route if I needed to do several...
 
IMO Jarrah is way to hard to be used as a cutting board. For Aussie timber, things like blackwood, Tas oak are more suitable choices. I don't like camphor laurel as they are quite smelly (albeit a good one by itself) though they are often found in local markets.

Anyway, the idea of having a solid timber board at the first place was that it can be refinished at a later stage. Starting from 40 is fine, but I would definitely suggest you go with a power tool, as end grain + jarrah is not a good combo for human power. Even with power tool you will find it really difficult to achieve an uniform result.

Getting a carpenter is a great idea but normal thicknesser struggles with endgrind hardwood regardless, and could damange the surface.

I would go with a random orbital sander (Festool time;))
 
I just re-did a 24" boardsmith with a 22" plane. Good planes this size are expensive unfortunately but with our sharpening skills it is a quick job; took about an hour. The heavy plane helps push through the end grain though I would imagine any sharp plane would work well if properly adjusted to a very thin cut. Using a block plane for end grain is a myth, IMO.
 
Find a woodworker who has a sanding machine which is designed to sand the whole surface of a board. Fix the cutting board to a piece of flat wood on the bottom, the send the board
through the sanding machine. Should be simple , easy, and very flat when it emerges. These machines come in two main varieties, drum, and wide flat belt.
 
I’ve just used a random orbital sander with the 1/3 sheet, perforated sandpaper. Can’t remember what grit, but would have been 40-60. When it was clogged, I put on a new one. Worked perfectly.

Better to wait for the board to dry out a bit first, but at the end of the day it’s a little extra time and a few $$. Just do it.
 
If you feel sanding is boring, get a Japanese hand plane, then you will have another blade to sharpen.
 
I'm most definitely not a woodworker but have refinished my larchwood board several times over 3 decades. Definitely worth doing - no question. You're right that the 40 grit sandpaper will clog quickly due to the mineral oil & beeswax. However, you'll not go through more than 2 or 3 full sheets using a 1/3 sheet sander (assuming your board is 600x400mm or smaller). Not a job for hand sanding IMO. As you go to finer grits, the sandpaper will clog less. Woodworkers suggested stopping at 240 grit but I prefer the feel of 400. There's not that much difference though. I haven't tried the wet/dry papers but they may be worth considering.
 
Nemo said:
Thanks for all the replies. Looks like there might be an orbital sander in my future.
Click to expand...

Before you go buying tools you don't have and may not need in the future, you might try searching for local woodworking clubs (or guilds or schools.) If you can find one, they would have members capable of helping you who might be willing to do so. (It might cost you a pint, or three, or some small fee for time and materials. But it's hard to imagine it'd be more than a decent random-orbit sander.)
 
Yet-Another-Dave said:
Before you go buying tools you don't have and may not need in the future, you might try searching for local woodworking clubs (or guilds or schools.) If you can find one, they would have members capable of helping you who might be willing to do so. (It might cost you a pint, or three, or some small fee for time and materials. But it's hard to imagine it'd be more than a decent random-orbit sander.)
Click to expand...
Not a bad idea. Maybe a Mens' Shed.
 
I ended up buying a random orbital sander.

Sanded it back with 40 grit discs util all the score marks were gone. This used about half a dozen discs. The discs loaded up pretty fast, presumably because of the oil cintent of the wood.

Then 2x 80 grit, 1x 120, 1x 240 and 1x 400 (although this was a more expensive, longer life disc).

After being cleaned, oiled and waxed, the finish is very nice. It literally looks as good as new.

It took me maybe 90 mins for the sanding but will probably be a lot less next time as I'll be much more familiar with the equipment and the process.
 
How much material did you have to remove? My cutting board is not flat and about 1/2 of the surface would need about 1-2 mm of material to be sanded away. Is that something that a random orbital sander could handle? The board is about 550 x 350 mm.
 
Nemo said:
I ended up buying a random orbital sander.

Sanded it back with 40 grit discs util all the score marks were gone. This used about half a dozen discs. The discs loaded up pretty fast, presumably because of the oil cintent of the wood.

Then 2x 80 grit, 1x 120, 1x 240 and 1x 400 (although this was a more expensive, longer life disc).

After being cleaned, oiled and waxed, the finish is very nice. It literally looks as good as new.

It took me maybe 90 mins for the sanding but will probably be a lot less next time as I'll be much more familiar with the equipment and the process.
Click to expand...
And there's the answer to your original question... definitely worth refinishing! Mine's been going for >30 years despite one near death experience. I bought a custom replacement board in Tasmanian Blackwood weeks ago but it sits unused. After refinishing my old Larch wood board for the umpteenth time, I haven't had the heart to retire it. It's been so very good to me.
 
I didn't measure the amount removed.

I think the worn wood was about 1 mm deep, so I'm going to guess that I removed somewhere between 1 and 2 mm. I think that how easy this would be would depend on the hardness of the wood, the direction of the grain and how much oil is in the wood.

I checked that the board stayed flat fairly often. I don't know whether this would be harder to do if you were trying to make the baord flat (rather than just keep it flat).
 
Yeah, it will not be easy. The board has wavy design (i.e. curved cuts were used to create the pattern). My theory is that, since such pieces will never fit together perfectly, this created tension in the board (as it was glued together) which then yielded un-flat surface of the board.
 
Indeed. 270 Ikeda gyuto for scale. The board is endgrain maple/walnut. The ‘wavyness’ of the surface follows the pattern

490A710E-DDDF-4AAD-886A-872CFCB5D166.jpeg
 
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