Excellent idea, Brian! Every time I do one I have to start from scratch with the perimeter guide-frame I mean.
I think I follow you on this - I'm going to shim one side on a very shallow pitched top surface for my newest design to get an even groove depth overall. The pitch aids the runoff of liquids kinda like you're describing. Guess I could shim one side UP to create a deeper grove --> shallow one like you are saying. Not a big fan of hanging anything over the edge of the board but a sink inset design would be pretty sweet. Good idea!That's pretty cool. Looks like it has enough play in it that you could try offsetting opposing corners in the third plane in order to carve a shallow--> deep groove so all the juice flows to the one corner.......with a spigot or funnel and an attached container hanging off the edge; while the board is flat on the work surface.
Saw a pre-made unit with that clever feature -would be a perfect food prep board when drying freshly washed chicken, steak or draining anything.
The original design used fixed sides. On mine, both the board ‘chock’ pieces on the bottom and depth guides on top are movable - know it doesn’t look that way since one set of knobs snugs both sets of guides down. So getting into the cavity is easy. I almost went the route you did but decided to make the adjustment more infinite within its available range. The final design was much simpler than I expected. (Only had to recut the upper guides once!)Nice design Brian. I've used a similar jig but mine was fixed sides and I used spacers between the cutting board and the sides. One thing I learned, and you may want to incorporate it, was that I should have drilled a finger hole through the backing panel so that I could stick my finger in and lift either the cutting board or one of the spacers out. With everything jammed into the frame there was no way to get pieces out without turning it upside down.
I hear ya - watched a video where a guy just screwed down the appropriate spacer/guide pieces and routed a groove lickety-split. Whatever gets the job done...I thought about adding adjustment but as you say it still has limited range and I was doing a one off at the time and not sure if I would ever make another one or another one the same size so I went the quick/easy route.
I finally got around to using it this week - had a few mods to make in the process. Overall, setup is pretty quick and feels very secure once it’s ready. Did three boards...and a cheese board from a highly figured piece of Maple.That's been my go-to approach, but I like your jig much better.
Interesting - I’ll keep that approach in mind if I need to flute. Thanks for the industrial grade insight, Chuck.Looks good. Where I first saw the jig was in a mantle factory I worked at for a short while. They were using a long narrow version of it to make stopped flutes in the faces of columns that the mantles sat on. One pass against either side and then added another spacer that sat on top and against the fence on either side and that put a groove down the center. By adding a spacer at the ends we made the two outside grooves shorter than the center one. I liked the looks of that so much I did it on my own mantle at home. Just saying that that design of jig has other applications too.