Inlaid cutting board sized for a rack of ribs

I built this board for my son's birthday. He loves to barbeque ribs (over coals). I finally occurred to me that we were always dealing with ribs that were way bigger than his boards. I asked permission to give him another one as he already has 4 cutting boards. He agreed that another board was the best solution.

 

I used a process outlined in an issue of Fine Woodworking. I haven’t been able to find it so far. (Update: SplinterGroup found the link. Here it is.)

Here are the steps (sorry – no pictures on this part):

 

1.    Create a groove with a ¼” router bit mounted on a trammel to swing an arc. The groove only needs to be between ¼ and ½ inch deep.

2.    Then cut through the rest of the board with a bandsaw.

3.    Use a pattern bit to clean up the bandsaw cut.

4.    Glue in an accent strip that is ¼” thick.

5.    Repeat steps 1-4 for each accent strip.
 
 

This board is maple 1.25"x9"x21.75" with 1/4" inlays of cherry, walnut, and padauk. Each inlay is two layers 1/8" thick. The finish is a couple coats of Clarks Cutting Board Finish.
 
 Some lessons learned:
 
 1. After cutting the channel with the router make 2 bandsaw cuts close to each side of the channel. The maple was somewhat brittle and tore out a bit cleaning up after a single bandsaw cut down the channel. Setting the bandsaw cut to leave less than a 1/16" on each side seemed to take care of that.
 
 2. The padauk was a bit oily. When I glued up the padauk inlay the glued gripped well between the padauk and the maple but was a complete failure between the two layers of padauk. I cleaned off the glue including a wet rag wipe down. I then dried the padauk and gave a good rub down with denatured alcohol. I clamped the glue up (with TiteBond III) over night. That left a solid result.
 
 3. The one thing that caught me by surprise was that the Cutting Board Finish did not protect from staining. It has worked well on other boards but this is the first one that is maple. The light colored wood shows stains more easily. If I had to do it over, I would probably give it a base coat of a more durable finish.
 
 I built this in about 11 hours over 4 days.