Guitar shaped cutting board

Asger likes to play the guitar, and we talked about making a gift for his guitar teacher, since he is a really nice guy and incredibly gifted when it comes to teaching children.

Given that the teacher is a professional musician, we agreed that making a guitar shaped cutting board would be a fitting gift.

I found an old piece of an elm slab, that wasn't quite big enough for a chair, and we sketched a guitar body on it. We talked about making a small neck for it as well, but we agreed that it would just get in the way when he had to use the cutting board.

After sketching,which was done by tracing the outline of an acoustic guitar, I sawed out the shape with the band saw.

The guitar shaped slab was then placed between the dogs on his bench. We used a scrub plane for traversing to reduce the thickness. I helped a bit since the elm is fairly tough. When the back side was reasonably flat, we moved on to a No 4 smoothing plane. We flattened the piece further by going diagonally and finished off going with the grain.

After that the upper side was treated in the same way.
We didn't use the thickness planer because the board was too wide, and I wanted Asger to really feel that he did the job himself.

The curved sides were sanded using the hand held belt sander, and then followed up by hand.
The edges were also broken by means of sandpaper.

Asger used a brander to write: TO SIMON FROM ASGER (In Danish) at the end of the cutting board.

As a finish we used the wood wax from Dictum and applied it using a small piece of rag and followed by a pollisoir from Don Williams  The elm looked spectacular after that treatment.

The finished thickness was around 1 5/8".

The proud craftsman with the guitar shaped cutting board.

Sanding the sides/edges.

Breaking the edge

Using an electric brander.

Using a pollisoir is hard work.