I have made a lot of cutting boards over the years, but this one was a first. I have a friend at church that wanted me to make him a custom size maple cutting board with a 1/2" deep "Blood Groove" on one side. When he has family over they cook up a big chunk of meat and he carves it and always gets the meat juices all over the place. So he gave me a drawing of what he wanted before Christmas and I told him I couldn't get anything done in the shop until February as we were tied up with some family stuff and a renovation of our guest room. So I finally got to it this month and I had to do a bit of scrambling to make it work out as this was a new wrinkle in my typical cutting boards. 

 

So I started off cutting up the strips to make 4 maple cutting board blanks that would end up being 19"x11.75"x1.5" once they were glued up. The final dimensions for the finished cutting board would be 17"x11.75"x1.25" after planing and final sanding.

 

 

So once I got the 4 cutting boards all planed down and run through the drum sander, I took 2 of the cutting boards and cut them to the final size to work with. Since I had never done a blood groove before, I wanted to make sure that I could do a bit of experimentation to get it right. I could have done it by hand using a plunge router, but I was not real comfortable with that. So I planned on doing it on the router table. So I had picked up a 3/4"x1" round nose bit and got it set up in the router table. I laid out on the fence the width of the bit edges along with the the starting and stopping points for both the short sides and long sides as well as marking out the the points on the the 2 cutting boards. 

 

The first cut I did on the short side I messed up with my mark, so I had to change it a little bit. After that the other 3 sides worked out perfect. I started with the bit at 1/4" so as to make it in 2 passes for the 1/2" depth. After doing all 4 sides I learned a couple of things. First of all I learned that the more passes that you made you have greater opportunity to mess up. So I flipped the practice board over and raised the bit up to 1/2" to do it with 1 pass per side. I was concerned about how the router and bit would handle it, but with the 3.25HP router it plowed through without a hitch. So now that I had done it twice on the practice board, I did the real thing and it turned out good. As for the practice board, I took it to the table saw and trimmed off the edges where the grooves were and made a smaller cutting board which I will give my friend as well. The left board below was my practice board.

 

I set up the router table with a round over bit and hit all the edges. I had to do a bit of hand sanding in the blood groove to smooth things out as well as to get the burn marks out of the corners as maple burns easy. Then I got out the orbital sander and ran the boards through the different grits to get them ready for the mineral oil. So here is the final outcome after sanding.

 

All in all, it turned out pretty well. Now that I have made it through my first blood groove, I know that I can repeat it again if/when someone wants one down the road. Before I had started I looked up videos online of people making blood grooves, but all of them were done using a hand held plunge router with an edge guide. I have never been good at using a plunge router by hand using an edge guide, so doing it on the router table really made so much easier for me.

They turned out nice, Allen!

 

I like your approach to cutting the grove. Much more stable cutting environment. If I'm doing a lot of stop grooves, I'll clamp stop blocks on the fence but with only one cutting board the tape/lines is how I would do it, too.

That did work out well, I can guarantee you if I tried on the RT it would have been more of a mess. It looks like after the trial run you hit it dead center, nice!

Looks like it worked out great!