Cutting Board Finger Grooves

If you would like to have handles, finger holds on the ends of your cutting board, I'll be your Huckleberry. I'll show you how you can do this. This action, putting in these finger holds, is dependent on this specific router bit. We've got the source for you. These are available in different sizes, so the different size is what radius are we looking at here.

If you go to a thicker board, you could go to a bigger radius, thinner board, smaller radius, so you wanna match that up. The board I'm working with today is about an inch and a quarter thick, so that works well with this particular cutter. Now, one of the things you might notice while you're looking at that bit is there's a line on there. I did that to make getting the height of the bit easier to do. I'm gonna start by just lowering that in the table.

I know it's way too high. And then the way I establish the line, and the way I'm gonna take advantage of the line, is with another tool that I use a lot. That is Micro Jigs Fit Finder, the way It's a Habseez finder. The way that works is that when this rests on my work, this points to the center of my work. So if I do something like that, and that, and that, when this surface is resting here, that pointer is pointing to the middle.

So now that I've got the center line marked out on the bit, I can take advantage of that to do this. Router's unplugged, of course, throughout all of this. When the fence comes into play, very common with router bits, fence comes forward until the face of the fence is even with the ball bearing. And I'm gonna do a double-check. That looks good.

Then when I work this, when I use it, I wanna have a stop block on the table. The corner of the board is gonna come against that block, move right to left to another stop block, come off the cutter. So what we need to do is establish this distance, and what I'm doing to take that measurement is I'm looking at that screw that's holding the bearing on, and I'm using that as a center point. Clamp the stop block in place. Same thing going that way.

I shoot for This is an 11-inch wide board, 11 and a half inches wide, and I'm shooting for my finger groove to be six inches long when I'm done. So now that I've got those clamped, I'm just doing a double-check for my distance. It's gonna be easier with this ruler. Then the action is very simple. Plug the router in, that's step one.

I'm gonna come against this stop block, enter, move along the fence, exit. When you do this, don't hesitate here, because you'll introduce a burn. So we wanna engage, keep moving, disengage. Don't hesitate at the start of the cut. Working without the center finder, the other way to do this would be in material that's exactly the same thickness, you could do test cuts, and what you're looking for is for that on the bottom and that on the top to be the same size, and you can adjust the height of the bit until you hit that.

But with this cutter, it's so easy to introduce those hand holds. Little bit of setup and you'll be able to do this to your cutting boards, and I like it. It adds a real nice touch. It makes it easier to get that cutting board lifted up off your countertop.