I just finished a cutting board class, really a bandsaw class, at Marc Adams taught by Alex Snodgrass. Great class! One of the things Alex mentioned at the end of the class was how to use some of the cutoffs. These are angled pieces, 30°, made of walnut, maple and cherry. They are about 20" long. These boards were cut into 4" long sections. Pairs were glued up on their short sides, one cherry centered and one walnut, six pairs in total. After a day of drying the long edges of two pairs were glued together and clamped. This is seen in the photo below with more unglued triangles behind the clamped parts.
The three diamonds from above are then glued up into a hexagon to be sliced into coasters. Not sure how best to slice them sans bandsaw. After the glueup above the three diamond cross sectioned pieces were placed in alignment as seen in the first photo. The second photo shows the three pieces with a hand clamp and highlights the gap that will demand some sanding.
The parts were sanded on the belt sander in an attempt to modify the angles slightly and achieve a better fit. This was partially accomplished as seen in the first photo below. Cherry veneer was selected to fill the gap. Three pieces were pushed in to fill the triangular gap as shown in the second photo below. The third photo shows the set of blocks glued and clamped with many clamps.
Unfortunately, after removing the clamps the bottoms side was examined. The alignment was very poor as can be seen in the photo below. A month later a second set of triangular blocks was prepped. There were many walnut versions with uneven edges and they were all slightly larger triangles than the remaining maple versions. These were sanded on the belt sander until they were shaped very similarly to the others. This time around I used fast setting CA glue from Loctite. It sets in about 15 seconds, so I pressed the pairs of triangles onto supports, while pinching them together for 30 seconds. The six triangles made are seen in the second photo. These six were then glued up in pairs with large pinch clamps.
Note the two blocks that are not mixed cherry and walnut centers, but just walnut. (Sound more like chocolates than wooden blocks.) There were more of the walnut than the cherry. That's life.
The blocks were glued up like last time. This time the gap was smaller and was filled with two kinds of veneer as shown in the photo below. A slight gap appeared during glueup and this will need to be fixed with glue and sandpaper on each coaster.
A decision was made to use the table saw to cut the coasters from the blanks. The challenge is getting accurate cuts as two cuts are needed for each slice. A long 30° offcut was taped to the inside corner of the crosscut sled for support. A series of ten 3/8" wide blocks were cut from a piece of scrap. Another scrap board was clamped to the sled to serve as a stop. The photo below shows the crosscut sled setup.
The block was a challenge to hold. About eight slices were removed from each block. Some were cut better than others. All were sanded on the belt sander until the saw marks were removed. There were gaps between triangles on most of the pieces. These were filled with glue and sanded. The edges were sanded and all of the corners were chamfered. The sawing left about 1" thick blocks. One slice was cut off by hand, but this was too much trouble to repeat. The coasters were cleaned of saw dust by blowing with the vacuum. This worked quite well using an attachment to constrain the output. The picture below shows the coasters after soaking in mineral oil and wiping off the excess. One coaster broke when dropped. A triangle popped out. With luck the remainder are not quite as fragile.
