End grain cutting board without thickness planer

[FS7]

To answer the original question, flattening without something like a drum sander, planer, or even a belt sander is pretty difficult. Your pieces have to be dead flat and aligned as well as can be, otherwise you'll be sanding for hours. Beyond that, it won't be perfectly flat, and enough so that you might get gaps in gluing. Even something like a router sled would work for flattening.

If you have that much of a problem with snipe, you should probably work on a different setup and/or improve your technique. Lifting the back of the board as you feed (and the front as it comes out) helps reduce snipe. Also, as mentioned before, what I usually do, whether I'm making long grain or end grain boards, I add extra length. On long grain (the final step of a long grain board, or the middle step of an end grain board) I add two longer strips. For example, if it's supposed to be a 20" cutting board, two of the strips (towards the outside, if not the outermost edge) will be 24" or so to prevent snipe. Similarly, on an end grain board, it's pretty difficult to avoid all tearout while flattening so I generally plan on a bit more length than I actually want.

I have never tried to surface end grain with knives, only helical, so I can't speak to that. Even so, helical heads require very light passes.

[handi]

I have made up the blanks for a cherry/maple cutting board.  After gluing up the blanks I used my ROS to flatten the glued up boards and remove glue lines in preparation for passing them through my Dewalt 734 thickness planer.  My concern is getting some kind of snipe and losing 2-3 inches off the board when passing them through the planer.  

Is it possible that I can skip the planer and just rely on a good ROS to surface the boards before the next cut to make the final glue up?

All sorts of plans online for “slab milling” Jigs using the router. A spinning bit, run parallel and flat across the top of your glue up, with make it flat and smooth with minimal tear out. 

I have a CNC so I do this regularly with glue ups that need to be flattened without the planer.