Cutting Cubes

Last night I cut up the last of the prepared maple I have.

You can tell that I’m a programmer by trade. I ended up with two blisters from about 90 minutes of cutting.  One I can sort of understand, it’s on the pad of my right index finger. That’s where I was using a piece of wood to hold down the cutoff cube so it didn’t spin back into the blade.

The other I didn’t discover until I took a closer look to see why my finger was hurting. Somehow I managed to create and pop a blister on the knuckle closest to the end of my finger on that same finger.

I also cut a little bit of cherry, but since our first project for these cubes is coming up and my wife thinks that we’ll come off better if they’re all the same, I didn’t cut that many of them.

It was surprising, though, that even just cutting through a ¾” “stick” you can tell the difference between white hard maple and cherry.

I also applied the finish to the first batch of assembled and sanded cube pieces . For this maple I’m using Waterlox (from General Finishes) as it imparts a slight amber hue to the wood and it brings out the grain more than the normal Tung Oil Finish I use.

The second batch of cube parts has been assembled and sanded and perhaps even the 3rd batch. My wife has been doing the gluing and sanding and I know the cubes I brought in last night got glued and she was working on sanding them when I left for the office this morning, but I’m not sure how far she got on getting them smoothed out.