This cutting board is going to be a Christmas gift for Kassi. We are currently in the middle of building a coffee table for her new apartment and so I thought I would use the maple and walnut scraps from that project to make her something useful.

The board is going to be maple end grain with walnut honeycomb inlays. I started out by gluing up the edge grain boards:

And then cutting that board into strips and flipping and re-gluing to create the main end grain cutting board:

I then CNC milled the hexagonal pockets out of the board that will later take the walnut hexagon inlays:

And then milled the 33 hexagon inlays:

And glued those into the previously milled pockets:

And lots and lots of sanding. (I should have been smarter about the thickness of the hexagonal inserts. I was also too afraid to use the block plane on that end grain since the sides of the inserts weren't well supported from breaking out.)

After all of that sanding I trimmed the sides to the proper width and length, routed in some handles and finished with mineral oil: