I received a message from a former colleague. The owner of his favorite restaurant had asked him if he was “handy with wood”. It turned out that he wanted holders for five sets of cutlery – and not one but thirty of them. Very cool that he thought of me in that regard.
The restaurant owner sent me the example below. Whether I could make something like that. And I received a picture of his cutlery. Only, the cutlery in the example was flat and therefore stackable. where his cutlery has round handles. Difficult to stack. I put my grey cells into action to solve this.
The round handles obviously fit nicely into a drilled hole. The blades of the knives fit into a sawn groove – just like in the example. So the design became a fusion of my own idea and solution from the example. With, of course, the restaurant’s logo burned into it. The choice of wood was quickly made. I showed the serving board that I made out of different types of wood and from tha,t the customer chose mahogany.
I had to make thirty of these blocks. Reason enough to think about how to do this with as few operations as possible. The limitation: the range of my laser engraving machine. It really can’t go larger than 36x36cm. Therefor I decided to make setts of five cutlery blocks and leave them as one piece for as long as possible.
I made jigs for all the operations so that I could execute them quickly and repetitively.
When finally separating the blocks I found out that I forgot about one parameter: the maximum cutting height of the cutter saw. The blocks are 11.5 cm high and the saw can cut max. 10 cm thick wood. So I had to cut in two strokes, with the result that the cuts did not run exactly in line with each other. With that, all the blocks were reworked by hand, with end grain planer and chisel and sander; quite a job that I had not anticipated. But a good learning!
The blocks are finished with Osmo Clear Wax which shows off the orange-red mahogany very well.
Customer:
Super NICE AND HAPPY WiTH THE RESULT