[Joseph Gwinn]

My latest domestic kitchen-support project was to take a very stiff
12"x18" high-density polyethylene (HDPE) cutting board, and trim it down
to 17.5", so it fits snugly over the stainless-steel kitchen sink,
allowing my wife to cut messy foods over the sink (and disposal).

Trimming the cutting board was easy with bandsaw and an ordinary
woodworking plane. The machining part of this project took maybe 30
minutes, mostly due to trimming and rounding edges with the woodworking
plane so the board rested snugly and securely on the edges of the sink.

For the record, ordinary (low density) polypropylene is a bit too
flexible, even if 0.5" thick. (The board cannot be thicker than this
and still fit in the dishwasher.) I was looking for 0.5" polypropylene,
which is offered by such web merchants as chefscatalog.com (Item #
24406), but The Container Store claimed to have such a thing, and they
are local, so I went there. It turned out to be 3/8" thick and made of
HDPE, not polypropylene, but seemed stiff enough, and cost only $17 or
so. The Chef's Catalog description is "high-density polypropylene",
which does not exist, so I bet it's HDPE as well.

If this modified 3/8" HDPE board doesn't work out, I'll buy some 0.5"
polypropylene stock and make a cutting board to fit the sink; this was
the original plan.

Joe Gwinn