This take on the Wood Whisperer Pizza Peel (Thanks Marc!) was made for a friend who requested one after I had previously made her this walnut cheese board with maple inlay. I wanted to use the same design for the pizza peel, and after watching the Wood Whisperer’s video, set to work creating one of my own.

After creating the template (using string and a pencil for the arcs, as I do not have the “bow” that he used), rasping the edges and sanding it smooth.  Here it is with the piece of walnut prior to cutting the required pieces.

    

Walnut and maple stock ready for glue up.  Then the glue up for the maple “stripes” with the walnut (these were just the first two clamps – several more were used along the length of the piece!).  The wood whisperer pizza peel uses 1/2″ stock – this is a little thicker – almost 3/4″.

 

I did up the glue-up in several sections to make sure that I got it right.

 

then glued the final two parts together, and aligned it to my template.  Draw round the template in pencil, then rough-cut at the bandsaw.

 

After the bandsaw, I used double sided tape to stick the peel to the template, and used a flush-trim router bit to mimic the shape of the template with the walnut. Following that, I used a round-over router bit to round over all the edges.

  

I rounded over the top parts of the handle, and then rough cut the handle shape on the band saw. Then flush-trimmed the top part of the handle before rounding over each side of the handle.  Then used a rasp, but mostly the belt sander to make the front lip for the peel.  No pictures of that though!

   

The pizza peel was then sanded with 120 and then 320 grit sandpaper and ready for finishing.

 

First I gave it several coats of mineral oil

 

And then finished it with Odie’s Wood Butter.  I don’t know if this is the best finish to use for this purpose, but didn’t manage to find any good guidance online for the best choice of finish for this purpose.  Obviously I want it to last, as it’s not going to a woodworker, so I came up with a potential solution with a custom pizza cutter.

 

After I met with Jess, we decided that it should have a hole in the handle for hanging it in storage/display, so back to the workshop to do that, and then i was inspired and used some of the left over scrap to make a pizza cutting arc – time will tell if it works.  I think it needs to be a few inches deeper to be really effective, but the hope is that avoiding a metal pizza wheel will keep the board looking pretty for a long time… fingers crossed!

 

A little inlay on the cutting arc to make it match, natch.

   

I hope you like it!