All,

Thanks to all of you who attended the kickoff meeting on Monday evening.

The team from Baldwin Hardwoods has come up with a plan to help size and prepare the wood for glue-ups using some of their machinery.  There have been a few setbacks in getting the wood transported to them and the holiday weekend is also impacting progress. 

Even with the issues, the hope if to have prepared wood for gluing available by mid to late next week.  Please watch your email for updates. 

The Fort Collins Creator Hub is looking at their calendar to schedule several work sessions for the cutting boards.  The workdays will be focused on helping the volunteers see examples of the steps needed for the cutting board builds and have others work on making boards.  If you are interested in helping, please let us know what time works for you in early September. 

 If you attended the meeting, you can tune out now until the next email. 

For those of you who didn’t make the meeting, please keep reading.

The meeting Monday evening started with an overview of the Bread N’ Boards fundraised by Larimer County Foodbank’s Emily Schwartz. The program has been in place for the past 12 years and has raised over $300,000 for the foodbank.  The foodbank supports about one out of every ten people in Larimer County. 

Steve Poehlman and Dave Moore from the Fort Collins Creator Hub presented their plans for forming a collation of woodcraft persons and volunteers to providing breadboards this year.  Sears Trostel had provided the breadboards for the last 12 years.  They provided 800 boards to the food bank last year.  The collation will use the Sears Trostel outline for designs and steps to produce the boards.

The Bread N’ Boards sale is always the first Saturday in December.  For 2019, the sale will take place on Saturday, December 7^th.  This date is firm and can not change.  In previous years, boards were made throughout the year and the finish sanding performed by volunteers on the last weekend of September and the first three weekends in October.  As we are just starting, the sanding and prep for sale dates may have to be a little more flexible but the food bank needs the number of sellable boards by early November. 

Sears Trostel committed to donating their scrap wood to the collation to make the breadboards.  They also provided about 150 boards which only need some final sanding.  Both of these are a huge help.

Baldwin Hardwoods suggested that they could use their 4 sided planer to prepare the wood strips for the glue-ups.  They will take several examples of the wood provided and work on a process to prepare the wood strips.  Once the wood strips are through the process, other volunteers can collect wood from the Fort Collins Creator Hub to start gluing up the blanks.

The first step is preparing the wood to create glue-ups at least 12 to 15 inches in width and 48 or greater inches in length.  The glued-up blanks are then sent through planers or sanders to flatten and remove any surface glue.  A CNC or band saw is used to cut out the board designs.  Sears Trostel has provided the Fort Collins Creator Hub with DXF files of their designs and the Creator Hub will create wood patterns for volunteers without a CNC to cut our the designs. 

After the blanks are ready and have been prepared for the CNC/saw process, they will be passed on to those who can cut out the board designs.  When the designs have been cut, they will need some edge sanding and quarter rounds routed on their edges. 

The final step is to perform any hand sanding to ensure the boards are ready for sale as they are sold unfinished. 

Please let Steve and Dave know what steps in the building process and number of boards you can support.

Thanks,

Steve Poehlman

Vice President Fort Collins Creator Hub