I am making an end grain cutting board, and for the edge treatment, I decided to go with chamfers. Now while the router left a nice edge, it did need sanding. I could have just used a sanding block and hoped I kept it perfectly on the chamfer face, but seeing as this face is only about 1/4″ wide, chances were good that the edges would get knocked down or rounded.
I decided to make a sanding block for sanding the chamfer, with a flat registration face and a sanding block face set off by 45 degrees. I mulled this over for a couple of days, and the resulting jig can be seen below.
Chamfer Sanding Block
I made this out of a maple plywood scrap I had laying around. The whole thing can be made with a 10″ square scrap.
I cut this out on the tablesaw to ensure the faces where the blocks are mounted would be perfectly flat and square to the face. This did leave a bit of an over cut on one side, and I’m sure you could stop short and finish the cut with a hand saw, and clean up the corner with a chisel. But this suited me.
The blocks are drilled and screwed to the frame, starting with the sanding block. The face block is attached flush with the outside edge of the frame. The screws are counter sunk, and the faces sanded to ensure there are no raised fibers.
On the face that rides on the workpiece, I put UHMW tape, so that it was smooth and slick and did not mar the workpiece. This can be found here: UHMW Tape. I used velcro on the sanding block face. This block was sized to fit these sanding sheets, but any other method could be used, such as double stick tape and ordinary sand paper.
Bottom of Sanding Block
Here is a close-up shot of the block in action. The velcro I used on the block did was not large enough for the entire pad, so some of the sanding sheet is shown loose over the chamfer. This did not affect the performance, or round over the edge.
Chamfer Sanding
Here is a short video showing it in action.
And here are the results of sanding the chamfers. I was also able to sand the small facet on the corners.
Sanded Chamfer
If you are interested in making one of these yourself, here are the plans.
Thanks for viewing. I hope you find this useful.
