Laser Cut Know Your Knives Chopping Board

This chopping board would be the perfect wedding gift - how many expensive knife sets languish in drawers and blocks because the owners don't know which is which?! This chopping board demystifies things for you. If you have no woodworking skills you can use a shop bought chopping board and add your own personal mark on it (ours was made from bamboo). If you are handy at woodworking, you might prefer to make one from scratch.

Step 1: Prepare Your Artwork

First, you need to prepare your graphics for laser engraving. We found artwork that we wanted to use, but it wasn't a vector graphic. We opened it in Adobe Illustrator, and using the live trace function we converted it to a vector suitable for LaserCut

Step 2: Load Path File Into Lasercut

Once we had a vector graphic, we loaded the path file into LaserCut. Once there we could scale it to the size we needed for our chopping board and position it in relation to the cutting bed. We then set it to cut the shapes into the surface of the chopping board. Cutting it rather than engraving it meant that it was faster and used lower power.

Step 3: Setup Laser and Cut Design

Once we had done that we could laser the design onto our chopping board. Because our board had a lip on one end where it sits against the work surface, we had to prop it up underneath so that it sat completely flat on the cutting bed. When we were ready we set the laser to work.

Step 4: Show It Off!

Once the laser had finished, our chopping board was ready!

All that remains is to present it to the happy couple... or maybe to keep it for ourselves, and have a dinner party to show off our awesome laser cut chopping board ;-)