Adhere Ceramic Tile to Wood

I'm working on a trivet, and one of the things I'm up against is that, this big chunk of tile needs to go into this border of walnut and MDF that I made. Problem is, I need to bond the tile to the substrate. And it's easy to join wood to wood, wood glue is gonna do that, but in this case, I've got dissimilar materials, I wanna join them and make sure they stay stuck together. So we need to go down a little bit different adhesive road for this. I'm going to use a form of hot glue.

Now this isn't just any off the shelf craft store hot glue, it's hot glue that's a combination of different glues including polyurethane glues. so once heated up, I can flow it out, the bond from this is really really good. And of course, part of the way it bonds is it cools, so my initial bond is really good, meaning, I need to move a little bit quickly to get my parts manipulated, I've got a little over a minute. As time goes on it'll cure more and more and more, until it gets to its full strength. So bottom line is, make sure your ducks are in a row, and everything is set.

And I think we're ready to go here. I know the tile fits inside there, I tried it a couple of times just to make sure. Remember we said we wanna not dilly-dally much. That's plenty of glue for what we're doing here, back in the cradle, drop in my tile. Now you can pick different forms of this adhesive depending on what you're doing, if it's wood to wood, or what the materials are.

Boy, did I get lucky, that dropped in the pretty well centered within the frame, I'm going to put just a little bit of pressure on it. One of the things that's cool about this, as a material for a trivet, and for those of you that don't know, a trivet is something that's can go into a kitchen, and it gives me a place to set hot stuff so I'm not putting it on my kitchen table or my countertop, with this glue, it's got pretty good heat resistance up to, doesn't start to let go again until about 280 degrees. So I can set a pretty warm kettle on here, even if the heat transfers through the ceramic tile it's not going to cause that glue to let go because of the heat resistance of the material. So this is a good solution, a good problem solver for what I'm doing here. This is all set, the next step on my trivet, I'll come along with a bead of caulk and I'll squeeze it into that tiny gap that I have there, and my trivet is all done and ready to protect my kitchen countertop.