Charcuterie Board for auction

One of our local Rotary clubs has an annual fundraising gala upcoming in Feb that benefits the county Crisis Nursery. We’re going to donate a couple bottles of wine for the silent auction, but I figured I’d make something in the shop to donate as well. I himmend and hawed about it for a while because I’m told it’s not a super high end auction, so making something large and impressive might not draw the $$ they’d like. SWMBO suggested a charcuterie board, which I thought was a good idea. I’ll probably do a couple pens too, just so there’s more items on the list to draw in some $$. 

For the board, I was just screwing around on CAD with some basic ideas and came up with a kind of center-stripe design with some added flair. I split a piece of Sapele after cutting out the central design with the Shaper origin. Then reversed the design against each side of the split Sapele.  I cut a couple descending sized plugs into the center piece for some added character.

I was actually a little surprised how far off the pieces were fitting together. Usually it’s like a glove when I reverse images during a cut. Not sure if it had to do with cutting along the grain lines or what happened. It wasn’t bad enough that I couldn’t get the pieces fit up with some sanding. Glued and clamped, it’s closed up just fine. 

After getting it cleaned up and roughing out the final shape, I was going to route a recess following the outside edge of the final shape and backfill it with epoxy to match colors with the other design element I had planned. Well, my guide slipped and the recess ended up all shifty, so I ended up hogging out the material all along the edge and flipping the board over so now it had kind of a floating look when placed on a counter. Thankfully I hadn’t cut in the design element yet!!

I chamfered the ends a bit so you can get your fingers under there to pick it up, then cut in the design element SWMBO picked out.

Backfilled with two tone epoxy and sanded down. I also backfilled some holes I cut in the plugs in the center of the design to add some more color. I had some issue with color bleeding into the maple, which surprised me a little. It’s not terrible, but not perfect.

For some reason, the pics show up as black and blue epoxy. The ‘black’ is actually a really pretty emerald green. Not sure why it shows that way in the pics. Oh well!

Since it’s going to have food on it, I wanted it easy to clean, but didn’t want to finish it with poly. So, I sanded to 3K, which polished the epoxy nicely, then finished with cutting board mineral oil. It’ll be easy to refresh and should clean easy since it’s so slick. I think I’m going to go back and add some feet to it, but we’ll see how I feel in a day or two. Tagged the bottom with the laser for posterity.