Cutting board

A cutting board is a durable board on which to place material for cutting. The kitchen cutting board is commonly used in preparing food; other types exist for cutting raw materials such as leather or plastic. Kitchen cutting boards are often made of wood or plastic and come in various widths and sizes. There are also cutting boards made of glass, steel, or marble, which are easier to clean than wooden or plastic ones such as nylon or corian, but tend to damage knives due to their hardness. Rough cutting edges—such as serrated knives—abrade and damage a cutting surface more rapidly than do smooth cutting implements.

Materials

A knife edge is a delicate structure and can easily be blunted by too abrasive a surface. Alternatively, it can be chipped if used on a surface that is too hard. A good cutting board material must be soft, easy to clean, and non-abrasive, but not fragile to the point of being destroyed. Hard cutting boards can, however, be used for food preparation tasks that do not require a sharp knife, like cutting cheese or making sandwiches.

Mineral oil

A mineral oil is any of various colorless, odorless, light mixtures of higher alkanes from a mineral source, particularly a distillate of petroleum.

The name mineral oil by itself is imprecise, having been used for many specific oils over the past few centuries. Other names, similarly imprecise, include white oil, liquid paraffin, pariffinum liquidum (Latin), and liquid petroleum. Baby oil is a perfumed mineral oil.

Most often, mineral oil is a liquid by-product of refining crude oil to make gasoline and other petroleum products. This type of mineral oil is a transparent, colorless oil composed mainly of alkanes and cycloalkanes, related to petroleum jelly. It has a density of around 0.8 g/cm³.

Mineral oil is a substance of relatively low value, and it is produced in very large quantities. Mineral oil is available in light and heavy grades, and can often be found in drug stores.

Three basic classes of mineral oils exist:

Cutting

Cutting is the separation of a physical object, into two or more portions, through the application of an acutely directed force.

Implements commonly used for cutting are the knife and saw, or in medicine and science the scalpel and microtome. However, any sufficiently sharp object is capable of cutting if it has a hardness sufficiently larger than the object being cut, and if it is applied with sufficient force. Even liquids can be used to cut things when applied with sufficient force (see water jet cutter).

How it works

Cutting is a compressive and shearing phenomenon, and occurs only when the total stress generated by the cutting implement exceeds the ultimate strength of the material of the object being cut. The simplest applicable equation is stress = force/area: The stress generated by a cutting implement is directly proportional to the force with which it is applied, and inversely proportional to the area of contact. Hence, the smaller the area (i.e., the sharper the cutting implement), the less force is needed to cut something. It is generally seen that cutting edges are thinner for cutting soft materials and thicker for harder materials. This progression is seen from kitchen knife, to cleaver, to axe, and is a balance between the easy cutting action of a thin blade vs strength and edge durability of a thicker blade.

This Old House

This Old House is an American home improvement media brand with television shows, a magazine and a website, ThisOldHouse.com. The television series airs on the American television station Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and follows remodeling projects of houses over a number of weeks. This Old House is produced by This Old House Ventures, Inc. with WGBH Boston as the PBS distributing station. Warner Bros. Domestic Television distributes the series to commercial television stations in syndication. Time Inc. launched This Old House magazine in 1995, focusing on home how-to, know-how and inspiration. In 2001, Time Inc. acquired the television assets from WGBH Boston and formed This Old House Ventures, Inc.

Overview

This Old House and its sister series Ask This Old House are often broadcast together as The This Old House Hour (originally known as The New This Old House Hour). Both shows are owned by This Old House Ventures, Inc. (a subsidiary of Time, Inc.) and are underwritten by GMC and The Home Depot. Weyerhauser lumber distributor, a previous underwriter, by 1989 had donated more than $1,000,000 a year to the show.This Old House is also underwritten by State Farm Insurance and Lumber Liquidators, Inc. Other underwriters throughout the show's tenure included Parks Corporation, Glidden paints, Montgomery Ward, Ace Hardware, Kohler plumbing, Schlage locks, Century 21 Real Estate, Toro lawnmowers/snowblowers, ERA Real Estate, Angie's List, and Mitsubishi Electrics. Two of the original underwriters were Weyerhauser and Owens-Corning.

Old House

Old House could refer to: