Do you make a thicker cutting board than those shown on your website?
'A thicker board ain't necessarily a better board'!
In fact the main reason why boards crack is not from manual abuse but from the constant absorption/desorption of moisture from, the atmosphere, fruit, vegetable, meat juices etc.
Wood losing moisture behaves similarly to wood being seasoned.
Wood does not dry evenly; water moves longitudinally through wood roughly 12 times faster than it does perpendicularly. Therefore end grain surfaces lose their moisture first and will be the first area to be stressed.
The next greatest rate of moisture loss is through the tangential (parallel with the growth rings) surface and that is about twice as fast as through the radial ( perpendicular to the growth rings) surface.
We can see from the above information that we can help guard against the aforesaid stresses by designing a board with optimal ratios of end grain surface area to radial surface to tangential surface. That is reduce end grain surface area as much as practicable whilst maintaining sufficient strength and always using quarter sawn timber.
And regarding end cleated boards it is imperative that those cleats allow for expansion and contraction of the wood otherwise eventually any glue will fail or the boards will crack.
Our Ned's plats, although lightweight in terms of mass, are heavyweights in terms of durability!
The images below illustrate the superior performance of a light weight quarter sawn Ned's plat over a back-sawn board.
Each image shows a back-sawn board (22mm thick) of Tasmanian blackwood on the left with a quarter-sawn size 14 Ned's plat on its right; the boards were cut from the same log. The top right and bottom images were taken about 2 years after the top left image. Although the Ned's plat was used and washed much more frequently (note the lovely silver grey bleaching of the same) it is in far superior condition. In fact there are no obvious checks (surface cracks) on the Ned's plats faces whilst the back-sawn board has severe checks on the face and serious cracks on the end grain penetrating approximately 50mm.
Definition of back-sawn: Is the term used in Australia to describe a board which is sawn such that the growth rings are approximately parallel to the broad face.
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