Let's get down to business, it's Business Time.
I'm going to talk in my business voice, so get ready...
I've had several people ask if they could buy one of the cutting boards I made for mom, but that was a lot of work. If I was paid CA's current minimum wage for the hours I put into it, and forgetting materials entirely, it would be over $250. That said, I've been researching cutting boards, as it seems a simple, lucrative business all on its own that I already know how to do and have the tools for. Too, many I've found online do run $100-$200, with some skyrocketting to nearly $1k (4' diameter circles). Even the smaller ones at this price are quite a bit larger than what I made, but not any more complex. The trick will be to increase throughput a lot, keep my costs low, design boards that the world market will actually want, and then get them out there through various online channels, maybe even some offline, like local brick-and-mortar shops. The guys at my local Ace Hardware are very mom-and-pop, and have such a mix of random things, they might be a good one to talk to. I live about 5 blocks from them, and they know me now. Might as well try it.
For throughput, there are 2 places that slowed the whole thing down. One was having to cut so many little blocks precisely. It was too hard to do to my specifications with my tools as they are currently set up, so I ended up later feeding each block by hand through my mini mill, loosening and tightening the vise each time, and occasionally adjusting the parallel risers and cleaning off the vise of shavings. I ran them through 4x each, and this took probably 4-6 hours total. None of this should be necessary. The second slowdown was the gluing. I glued the 132 blocks into 66 pairs, then joined each pair of pairs into 33 lengths of 4, and so on. This was over 100 individual gluings and clampings, each with a minimum 30-minute wait for drying. I've seen people join all the squares of a board like this in one fell swoop, though the alignment is always a little off here and there. I've thought of a plan to change how this is done that is so crazy, it just might work.
I want to get my saw set up perfectly (i.e. realign the blade, check the fence alignment, etc...), as I was getting burn on the sides of rip cuts, then cut planks of my 4 source woods into strips as wide as the boards are thick to make square sticks, 4' long. Using a flat surface, perhaps a sheet of plexiglass as a base, I would lay out and then edge-join an entire row of these sticks together with glue and many clamps, and then do that for each one, so I'd have a bunch of 4' long x board-width tall rows. Then I'd glue all of these row sheets together to form what would appear from each end to be a finished, end grain cutting board, but which would be 4' tall. If you note that cutting boards come in thicknesses from about 1/2" through 2" tall on average, just imagine one that's 4 feet tall. Now lay that on its side and feed it through the band saw to cut whole, completed boards from the chunk. I'd probably need to glue up sheets to make 2 halves of the board so each half-chunk would fit through the 12" clearance height of my band saw, then glue each board-half together in the end, but this would put most of the gluing up front, with the final operations being cutting, sanding, and finishing. People want different sized boards depending on need and budget, but I figured 6 @ 2" (professional thickness), 9 @ 1.5", and 18 at 1.25" (most common/affordable thickness) out of a single block gives me 33 boards.
As for cost, boards of this size (about 15" x 16.5"), out of the quality of wood I'll be using command a pretty high price. The nearest I can figure, a fairly standard going rate would be about $190 for 1.25" thick, $210 for 1.5" thick, and $240 for 2" thick. If these numbers aren't ridiculous, and 33 people out there will actually pay this, then the 33 boards becomes a net of $6750. Next up is to figure out gross profit, which is net minus my costs. The liquids - glue, finishing oil, maybe some bees wax amount to perhaps a few dollars per board, and honestly aren't much worth carefully figuring out at this quantity. They're negligible. That leaves one other consumable, wood.
If I do this, I'd probably order wood through Woodworkers Source. Their prices are right on-par with my local plywood shop's solid lumber (I called the latter for pricing today), and if I buy in "project packs," shipping is free, which is a real savior when buying long boards of wood online. I could just go to my local shop, but they don't have 1/20th of the species the online store (based in AZ) has, and only about 2 there are useful to me for cutting boards. I believe project packs themselves also cut the cost down further, so it'll be overall cheaper per BF to order online. Most of the packs come as 20 BF quantities, and the majority seem to fall into the $200-$250 range, which works out to about $10-$12.50/BF for quality stuff. Some packs are far cheaper ($130), some absurdly more expensive ($800+). Trying to keep species selection to around $220/20 BF ($11/BF) means the boards, which are between 2 and 3.5 BF, depending on thickness (board feet are a unit of volumetric wood measurement equivalent to 144 cu. in., or a 12" square, 1" thick), end up costing me between $24 and $38.
In conclusion, foodies and chefs will pay a pretty penny for a good, solid cutting board, and they're easy enough to crank out. The crazy prices I stated initially are actually on par with what I've found all over online. That said, even if I can't pull in the figures I estimated for this effort, they're still hovering around an order of magnitude what my costs would be. Even if I have to 'drastically' reduce prices to move product, it would still be pretty profitable. Gross profit for one run - selling 33 boards - is still more than I've ever made in a month. If nothing else, even low sales would be a nice influx for the bank account. However, I've decided that before I shell out $800+ for unknown woods to make a product I'm not sure I have the proper exposure to sell, I'm going to do a few things in preparation. One, I'm going to order small samples of wood in the species I think I might use. It's hard to tell based on photos online what you're really getting in terms of color, grain tightness, and hardness, and the samples will only add to my IWCS (wood collector society, believe it or don't) official-size wood collection. Two, I'm going to try a small, proof-of-concept run with a mix of scrap wood I have, and a few small pieces I'll get at local shops, keeping overall expenditures under $50 so it's no big loss if it doesn't work as I hope, or no one buys them. This won't be a 4' tall block of wood initially, but perhaps a 1' block, just to see if it's crazy to presume I can cut a handful of such huge pieces from the massive chunk without major problems.
I'm not seeing this as a get-rich-quick scheme, and it would still be a lot of hard work, even if it were to become successful, but it's still nice to imagine for the time being that this might be a nice way to keep me afloat while I send out resumes, and perhaps even help lead me toward being fully self-sufficient, solely through this growing hobby. I don't want to be "the cutting board guy," but I certainly don't mind making a bunch of cutting boards if people want to dump money on me for doing so :)
I've had several people ask if they could buy one of the cutting boards I made for mom, but that was a lot of work. If I was paid CA's current minimum wage for the hours I put into it, and forgetting materials entirely, it would be over $250. That said, I've been researching cutting boards, as it seems a simple, lucrative business all on its own that I already know how to do and have the tools for. Too, many I've found online do run $100-$200, with some skyrocketting to nearly $1k (4' diameter circles). Even the smaller ones at this price are quite a bit larger than what I made, but not any more complex. The trick will be to increase throughput a lot, keep my costs low, design boards that the world market will actually want, and then get them out there through various online channels, maybe even some offline, like local brick-and-mortar shops. The guys at my local Ace Hardware are very mom-and-pop, and have such a mix of random things, they might be a good one to talk to. I live about 5 blocks from them, and they know me now. Might as well try it.
For throughput, there are 2 places that slowed the whole thing down. One was having to cut so many little blocks precisely. It was too hard to do to my specifications with my tools as they are currently set up, so I ended up later feeding each block by hand through my mini mill, loosening and tightening the vise each time, and occasionally adjusting the parallel risers and cleaning off the vise of shavings. I ran them through 4x each, and this took probably 4-6 hours total. None of this should be necessary. The second slowdown was the gluing. I glued the 132 blocks into 66 pairs, then joined each pair of pairs into 33 lengths of 4, and so on. This was over 100 individual gluings and clampings, each with a minimum 30-minute wait for drying. I've seen people join all the squares of a board like this in one fell swoop, though the alignment is always a little off here and there. I've thought of a plan to change how this is done that is so crazy, it just might work.
I want to get my saw set up perfectly (i.e. realign the blade, check the fence alignment, etc...), as I was getting burn on the sides of rip cuts, then cut planks of my 4 source woods into strips as wide as the boards are thick to make square sticks, 4' long. Using a flat surface, perhaps a sheet of plexiglass as a base, I would lay out and then edge-join an entire row of these sticks together with glue and many clamps, and then do that for each one, so I'd have a bunch of 4' long x board-width tall rows. Then I'd glue all of these row sheets together to form what would appear from each end to be a finished, end grain cutting board, but which would be 4' tall. If you note that cutting boards come in thicknesses from about 1/2" through 2" tall on average, just imagine one that's 4 feet tall. Now lay that on its side and feed it through the band saw to cut whole, completed boards from the chunk. I'd probably need to glue up sheets to make 2 halves of the board so each half-chunk would fit through the 12" clearance height of my band saw, then glue each board-half together in the end, but this would put most of the gluing up front, with the final operations being cutting, sanding, and finishing. People want different sized boards depending on need and budget, but I figured 6 @ 2" (professional thickness), 9 @ 1.5", and 18 at 1.25" (most common/affordable thickness) out of a single block gives me 33 boards.
As for cost, boards of this size (about 15" x 16.5"), out of the quality of wood I'll be using command a pretty high price. The nearest I can figure, a fairly standard going rate would be about $190 for 1.25" thick, $210 for 1.5" thick, and $240 for 2" thick. If these numbers aren't ridiculous, and 33 people out there will actually pay this, then the 33 boards becomes a net of $6750. Next up is to figure out gross profit, which is net minus my costs. The liquids - glue, finishing oil, maybe some bees wax amount to perhaps a few dollars per board, and honestly aren't much worth carefully figuring out at this quantity. They're negligible. That leaves one other consumable, wood.
If I do this, I'd probably order wood through Woodworkers Source. Their prices are right on-par with my local plywood shop's solid lumber (I called the latter for pricing today), and if I buy in "project packs," shipping is free, which is a real savior when buying long boards of wood online. I could just go to my local shop, but they don't have 1/20th of the species the online store (based in AZ) has, and only about 2 there are useful to me for cutting boards. I believe project packs themselves also cut the cost down further, so it'll be overall cheaper per BF to order online. Most of the packs come as 20 BF quantities, and the majority seem to fall into the $200-$250 range, which works out to about $10-$12.50/BF for quality stuff. Some packs are far cheaper ($130), some absurdly more expensive ($800+). Trying to keep species selection to around $220/20 BF ($11/BF) means the boards, which are between 2 and 3.5 BF, depending on thickness (board feet are a unit of volumetric wood measurement equivalent to 144 cu. in., or a 12" square, 1" thick), end up costing me between $24 and $38.
In conclusion, foodies and chefs will pay a pretty penny for a good, solid cutting board, and they're easy enough to crank out. The crazy prices I stated initially are actually on par with what I've found all over online. That said, even if I can't pull in the figures I estimated for this effort, they're still hovering around an order of magnitude what my costs would be. Even if I have to 'drastically' reduce prices to move product, it would still be pretty profitable. Gross profit for one run - selling 33 boards - is still more than I've ever made in a month. If nothing else, even low sales would be a nice influx for the bank account. However, I've decided that before I shell out $800+ for unknown woods to make a product I'm not sure I have the proper exposure to sell, I'm going to do a few things in preparation. One, I'm going to order small samples of wood in the species I think I might use. It's hard to tell based on photos online what you're really getting in terms of color, grain tightness, and hardness, and the samples will only add to my IWCS (wood collector society, believe it or don't) official-size wood collection. Two, I'm going to try a small, proof-of-concept run with a mix of scrap wood I have, and a few small pieces I'll get at local shops, keeping overall expenditures under $50 so it's no big loss if it doesn't work as I hope, or no one buys them. This won't be a 4' tall block of wood initially, but perhaps a 1' block, just to see if it's crazy to presume I can cut a handful of such huge pieces from the massive chunk without major problems.
I'm not seeing this as a get-rich-quick scheme, and it would still be a lot of hard work, even if it were to become successful, but it's still nice to imagine for the time being that this might be a nice way to keep me afloat while I send out resumes, and perhaps even help lead me toward being fully self-sufficient, solely through this growing hobby. I don't want to be "the cutting board guy," but I certainly don't mind making a bunch of cutting boards if people want to dump money on me for doing so :)