Most DIY knife block plans start with a solid block of hardwood and a drill press: bore a series of angled holes, and you’re done. This one took a different path: a tall, narrow, fully hollow plywood carcase with the knife slots cut as straight saw kerfs across the top edge, plus one larger open channel running through the front of the body.
Overview
The block reads as a tall rectangular box rather than the traditional squat wedge shape most store-bought knife blocks use, closer to what’s sold as a “vertical knife block.” Instead of drilling angled holes into a solid piece of wood, the top edge of the box has a row of thin saw-kerf slots cut straight down, each sized to hold a knife blade upright. Running through the body is one wider open channel, visible from the front, consistent with common vertical-block designs that reserve a larger slot for a single big knife (chef’s knife or cleaver) separate from the narrower blade slots on top, though that specific intent isn’t confirmed in writing here.
The most interesting thing about this build, though, isn’t the slots. It’s what’s not there. The carcase is completely hollow and open, with no solid bottom or back panel closing it in.
Why an Open, Hollow Body
Traditional wooden knife blocks have a real, well-documented downside: food debris and moisture can work their way down into the drilled slots and get trapped where they’re hard to see or clean out, which is enough of a concern that it shows up regularly in kitchen-cleaning coverage (The Takeout; Cooking Flavour, both retrieved 2026-08-30). Building this block as a fully open box rather than a solid, closed-bottom piece means there’s nowhere for that debris to collect and hide. Air moves through it, and it can be wiped out or aired dry rather than trapping anything at the bottom of a blind hole.
Materials
- Plywood: the carcase panels show the fine, tightly-spaced ply lines typical of Baltic birch plywood along the exposed top edge, where the saw-kerf slots are cut straight into the panel’s own edge grain. This matches the birch plywood used across most of Jeremy’s other shop-built plywood projects, but the specific species isn’t labeled anywhere in the source photos.
- A lighter hardwood edge band: the visible front, top, and side edges are wrapped in a lighter-toned hardwood strip (consistent in appearance with ash or maple), giving the plywood carcase a finished edge rather than leaving raw plywood edge grain exposed on the show faces. Species not confirmed.
- Wood glue, presumably, for the edge banding and carcase joinery; not directly visible or confirmed in any photo.
Design
The build started on paper. A hand-drawn sketch in a grid notebook lays out a front view and a top view, with five slot marks drawn across the top. This appears to be the source for the block’s proportions and slot spacing, sketched out directly on the workbench next to the actual plywood parts (marked with blue painter’s-tape reference tags for orientation during glue-up).
No inch measurements are legible in the sketch photos, so this documents the design approach (sketch first, then cut) rather than a set of numbers a reader could copy directly.
Build Process
Carcase assembly. The plywood panels were glued and assembled into a tall, narrow box, left fully open through its interior. No solid bottom panel was installed. A blue-tape reference label on the back panel appears to be a grain-match or assembly-orientation mark used during glue-up, a habit that shows up across several of Jeremy’s other plywood builds.
Cutting the top slots. The finished photos show a row of clean, evenly-spaced saw-kerf slots cut straight down into the top edge of the assembled carcase, sized to hold a knife blade, not a full-width hole. No photo documents the actual cutting step (table saw setup, spacing jig, etc.), so the specific method used to space and cut the slots isn’t confirmed.
The Finished Block
The finished block pairs the row of top slots with the open front channel, all built into a compact, hollow plywood carcase with a clean hardwood edge band. It’s a small project compared to Jeremy’s furniture builds, but it’s a distinctly different construction approach from the typical solid-block, drilled-hole knife block, worth documenting on its own.
Related Projects
This is currently the only kitchen-adjacent piece in the Furniture category, so it stands somewhat on its own for now. It shares its plywood (birch plywood, visually) and clean, minimalist styling with other builds like the modern minimal coffee table and the modern indoor plant stand, both good candidates for a “more birch plywood projects” cross-link.