Decorative Knife Magnet

This project shows how you can make a knife magnet, where you can place the knives anywhere on the wood, and not just in a few select places, as it features many small neodymium magnets. The wood is not only decorative, it also protects your knives.

For this project I used pheasant wood, neodymium magnets and wax.

STL files are included for milling.

OpenScad file is included, if you would like a longer or shorter knife magnet.

Supplies

Wood blank, at least 350x53x23 mm.

Wood blank for keyholes, at least 60x25x4 mm

Neodymium magnets 62 pcs 8x4 mm

Wax, oil or lacquer for final finish (I used wax)

Screws for wall mount.

Step 1: Milling the Knife Block

Place the wood blank face down, and mill the file knifemagnet.stl, with a 5-7mm flat endmill.

It is important to get the z-level right, as the holes only leave 0.8 mm of wood between the magnets and the knives.

The face should be plane and sanded, before milling from the rear, as there is not much wood that can be removed after milling, due to the shallow magnet holes.

Step 2: Milling and Glueing Keyholes

Instead of using a special t-slot bit, this design allows you to use simple flat endmills for milling the screw keyholes.

If you are using a softer wood for the main part, you should use a hardwood for these keyhole inlays.

Step 3: Glue in Neodymium Magnets

Use superglue to hold the magnets, but also to support the veneer thin layer of wood in the bottom of each hole.

To maximize strength, you should mount all magnets with the same pole facing up. This is easily done by stacking all the magnets in one pile, and paint the one end with a permanent marker. Keep taking magnets in the same way, from the non painted end.

One magnet, 8x4mm, in each hole will hold the knives with a pleasing snap. But for heavy and narrow bladed knives, you can insert two magnets in each hole. The second one obviously does not need to be glued in :)

Step 4: Customizing

If you would like to make a diffferent size knife magnet, you can modify the attached OpenScad file.
You can dowload OpenScad from: openscad.org