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I Made 3 Cutting Boards With 3 Time Limits: 5 Min vs 5 Hours vs 5 Days

January 31, 2026 · 24 min · 204 views

I saw John Malecki's cutting board challenge and thought, yeah, I could do that. My first cutting board, the tentacle one, was a failure, and I wasn't leaving it there.

There's also the woodworker's curse: the first year a man picks up woodworking, his whole family gets cutting boards for Christmas. This was the year.

So, three cutting boards, each under a different time limit.

5 minutes

The 5 minute board is a wood cookie, a round slice of log, because there's no cutting involved. Clean up the edges, sand, finish with beeswax, carnauba paste and mineral oil. Done. Someone could sell that thing on Etsy.

5 hours

A simple edge grain board: Takian as the main wood, tiny strips of red ironwood and a wider strip of teak. Cut to about 42 cm, ripped into 3 cm strips, planed, glued up once, then cut to size, sanded and finished.

Five hours sounds like a lot until you remember glue needs to dry. That forced a single glue-up, so no curves and no fancy patterns, and I only got to it after an hour and a half. The last hour was a rush (a safe one, always).

5 days

A painter's palette cutting board, a gift for an artist, with colored wood paint drops inlaid into the palette. Multiple glue-ups, curvy cuts, 3D-printed router templates, inlay routing. This is where things got complicated.

The bandsaw didn't agree with fusing the two boards. I tried hogging out the paint drops with my trim router, which isn't built for that, and the plunge router's collet wouldn't hold a bit. On my first test inlay with the 3D-printed template, the bit ejected itself mid-cut. That sound made me rethink my life choices.

What finally worked: bandsaw to get close, trim router for shallow cleanup passes, then freehand with the plunge router, since the template tolerances were off. The fit wasn't perfect, so I reached for the woodworker's safety net, wood dust and glue. It's not sellable, but it's a gift, and it has character.

The most frustrating part: I found out router inlay kits existed the day before I started carving, and they're impossible to find in Thailand. I've since bought one abroad.

Where the time goes

The 5 minute board proves nature does 90% of the work if you let it. The 5 hour board is the sweet spot. The 5 day board is close to a disaster of my own making, saved by sawdust, glue and French stubbornness. The extra days didn't buy much quality. They mostly went into solving problems I created myself.

A few other things I learned: glued-up strips move less than one wide board, water popping raises the grain before the first wash does, and the trim router is for trimming.

The numbers

  • 3 cutting boards
  • 5 minutes, 5 hours, 5 days
  • 42 cm long, 3 cm strips for the 5 hour board
  • 1.5 hours before the first glue-up

Watch it

Watch the full build on YouTube.

Gear and links

Recording equipment:

Power tools:

Safety and jigs:

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