George and Jimmy's Glue Tips

You ever use glue in your shop? A little bit, a little bit. It, you know, I find when I'm teaching classes gluing, clamping, choosing the right glue, people don't really look at it always like choosing the right tool. Right. But, they need to.

Choosing the right glue and the right glue technique. Yeah, so that's why we're here today is Jimmy and I are gonna give you some of our well founded gluing tips. Back and forth, tit for tat. Yeah, jump in. Tit for tat.

Yeah, tit for tat. I'll show you a tip here. So if you have a knot, you have an open knot right here, right, and we're gonna take that open knot, fill it in with some native sawdust and then just use some CA glue on there, or cyanoacrylate. That's the instant glue that we've all used our whole lives. And just begin to build up that surface.

And what's nice about this is you're using, when Jimmy said the native sawdust, so as opposed to using a wood dough in here that may or may not match, this is walnut sawdust going in a walnut board. So your chances of success, which is color match, are really good. And now we're gonna let that dry for a couple minutes and let that, see what's goin' on there. Yeah, you're kinda there already. And we have just a little bit of a wacko and we wanna get it perfect.

Little bit. Use Titebond Instant Accelerator. And then when you use the accelerator it doesn't always cure instantly, takes probably about 20, 30 seconds. So give it just a few seconds to kick. We'll let that kick for a minute and then, with a rasp or a plane or a sanding you can get that nice and smooth.

And one of the things, when you're using accelerator in combo with CA, you wanna be careful with the accelerator. Again, it's somethin' like, I don't know, I run into this when we do pintering. People overuse the accelerator sometimes. And if you've seen your CA glue crystallize it's 'cause you used too much accelerator. And it gets very hot.

It's actually fairly warm right there. You don't wanna, you could burn yourself. It also creates a fume, so keep it away from your face. You don't wanna inhale what's comin' off of it. Yeah, you've got a quick rasp.

We'll hit that off quick and we'll probably get a nice little quick finish on that. All right, while he's rasping, glue application inside a mortis. So, lots of us use glue brushes like this. And in general, a flex brush is a good glue application device. However, for this application we're gonna make it more better by takin' a pair of scissors and just finessing the end of that glue brush a little bit.

Nothing says you have to use it the way it came out of the package. So think about you know, if you're painting and you're doin' detail work, you're probably using an angled paintbrush so that you can better control the paint flow. So by trimmin' those tips down so that this tip is about the tip, by trimmin' that down into a little bit more of a chisel point, now when I come along with my glue that gives me a lot better control inside here to make sure that the glue is gonna stay inside the mortis and not end up in a huge mess. All right, it's all you. Let's roll.

Well, I'll show you a tip here. If you ever use MDF, if you ever use MDF we find it's difficult to paint those open edges of the MDF. They're crazy porous. The face is a little bit less porous than the sides, so to cure that we'll just put a little bit of just regular Titebond on there and you could brush it or you could just smooth it in there with your finger and now you've created a completely sealed edge. Let that dry and that's completely skinned over.

You can sand that once that dries and George suggested maybe we water it down. Right there, that's straight out of the bottle. But if you did a CNC into MDF, you did like a full 3D mapping of the CNC there's a good opportunity where you might wanna water it down, maybe 50/50, then you brush it in so the details don't fill in. So you do it a few times and the water will suck out and the glue will stay on the surface. You're using glue as a sizing agent.

So sizing just means you're pre-sealing the grain before you do the next step. I love this 'cause I do a lotta CNC work and I had never actually thought of using glue for this, so I'm really glad that you're here. 'Cause that's when you release that cut area, when you open up that cut area it does, like Jimmy said, you can really see the porosity there. So, that's very cool. I like that.

All right, we gotta move glue over a big area. So, we're gonna glue this to this. Imagine it's like a big, giant table. Yeah, or making a turning blank or whatever. So, you've got a lotta square footage of area that you wanna cover.

There it is. Whew, burp. So first thing, get glue on there. And then, somethin' like I do love my acid brush, but that would take a lifetime. Piece of threaded rod is gonna act like a mastic knife.

Look at that fancy pants. Give you a nice uniform coat. And you know, when it's cold in Wisconsin you need a uniform coat. Different topic. Boom, clamp, done.

So it's just a uber fast way to get glue spread. That's nice, and you could just go wash it off at the sink or throw it away. Yeah, don't just set that on your workbench like I just did. Clean that up and live to fight another day. All right, this is still curing.

I wanna try and get us the nice finish so I'm lettin' that cure up nice and thin. All right, here's another thing. Similar idea with the wood fill. This is like making pasta dough. You take your native sawdust and just like drop in an egg inside of flour and just start doin' that.

You're mushin' that around. You basically come up with like a little bit, little tiny piece of dough. And you can control the consistency by pulling in more sawdust or pouring in more glue. And now you have like a little nugget. You can take that and go push that into a screw hole.

You know, if you have a big job you can make a nice big meatball of that. You take that where you want. Shove that into a crevice and it becomes again, if you sere using native wood. We're dumpin' walnut dust in a piece of maple here. Yeah, I of course, would let that cure for several hours before you go back and sand it.

So that's the way of makin'. So, part of the benefit to the CA on this approach is the CA's gonna be much faster. Yeah, but here, what's good about this is you could put in holes on the side of a table leg, for instance. 'Cause it's got some body to it. Yeah, you could work on a surface vertically or horizontally.

Here it's just really kinda workin' straight on the open gap there. So sometimes, I was thinkin' about this, one of the projects Jimmy did this week was a really cool finger jointed box and I was thinkin' about this when you were puttin' your box together. Sometimes the tip is about choosin' the right product. So this is Extend Wood Glue and it's just what it sounds like. It tacks up, it cures more slowly than the other glues in the family.

So sometimes, you know, it's nice to break your glue up into sub assemblies if you can. But, this four sided box that Jimmy did, there was no way to do that. All the finger joints had to come together at one time. Right. The extended glue is a great choice for that, 'cause it gives you more working time to get everything square and snug before the glue starts to grip.

I tend to, also this is another tip. There's really no physical test for this tip, but I always use as little glue as possible. I see a lotta guys, they tend to get tons of squeeze out and that just causes you more cleanup later. But, if you did have some cleanup, and I'll show you on this example I made over here. When I have friends over at the shop while I'm doin' a glue up and they see glue squeezin' out they go to wipe it.

I say, no no no no no no, leave it because these little dots are easy to break off later than to clean up all the nuance. That may or may not work well. So, that's much easier. That's perfect. So, if I was to wipe that clean earlier on while it was still soft I'd basically have a big swoosh line there that I'd have to work on sanding out, especially a grain like oak.

Oak will fill right up, you'll have a hard time. You gotta past the bottom of those little divets to get rid of that glue. Somethin' like this, you wanna just leave it til those little nobules harden and then you can just scrape them off later. Not the, glue residue is not the accent you wanna have show up under your finish. It's impossible to get rid of.

So, leave the drips. Do, before I glue these, face to face, do that thing you do with your finger in the glue bottle, kinda like drawing a line. I'm obsessed with getting this done. I see that. That gives you a good, really good start to get at it with the orbital.

If you need to fill it in more, now that we've dug into our shell, our shell of CA glue, it's a little bit light. We'll just get it back to the right color. And what a great game, 'cause I don't mind havin' a knot in my project, but I probably do mind havin' a hole. That was actually a hole all the way through. I would mind havin' a hole all the way through.

Yeah, we just put some back on that. Built a dam. So, I'll show you, if you're doing, this trick comes in handy when you're doing hardwood edges on an open face like library cabinet, for instance. You've got to do eight foot long glue ups and you're gonna glue a hardwood strip on the open edge of plywood or MDF. So, you're trying to really control your application so you don't end up with a big muddy mess when you're done.

Yeah, one way could be like this. I'm gonna do it wrong first, 'cause you do that and you end up with an inconsistent squeeze out, you get a big mush here, some mush there, you know. Gonna get rid of that. That's my bench. What.

Just like I would do with a pencil I just keep my finger riding along the side, and I'll do that eight, nine, six feet and I have a nice consistent squish out. I know that when I put my opposing piece on it we're not gonna get a big glob somewhere versus a glob somewhere else. So that's just controlling using the bottle itself and some quick blend techniques. It's such a nice, simple way to control your application so that you don't end up with puddles in one spot and dry in another spot. All right, the masking tape is here 'cause these two pieces, now we stuck together.

I was gonna show you this. I use double faced tape in my shop all the time. Every once in a while I run out of it. But, double face tape alternative is masking tape and masking tape. Part of the key is you masking tape both surfaces.

And then. Gaga, too much. Oh you think? You're right 'cause that's gonna squeeze out. No, you're right.

I was just seein' if Jimmy would catch that. You don't wanna put too much. You don't want it to squeeze out past your tape. Just need a little dab. I was over zealous.

Little more. That's too much. No, it's not. Put two dots. That's good.

Then we do this. I should've done this early 'cause the drying time on this is a little slower 'cause we don't have accelerant in there and we're not, I could have put it on the mating piece of tape would've been the smart money. Well, let's do this, let's revisit this, 'cause here's the thing. There's a method to the madness with the accelerant. So, I'm gonna start over.

Look at that squeeze out. See how much squeeze out you got. That was very close to the tape, edge of the tape, which would be bad. Start again. So, we're gonna start again.

Spin again, begin again. That's a movie probably before your time. Okay so if you're gonna use accelerator as part of your CA process, accelerator doesn't have like cure time. CA glue start, as soon as you spread it or as soon as you apply it, CA glue starts to go. So you wanna do the accelerator first and not again, get crazy with this 'cause it can crystallize the CA.

Then do the CA glue. That a fact? I guess. Then do this. So, let's let that sit a second.

Here's another tip. Say for instance, you're doing base molding or crown molding and you're one foot short and you don't wanna go back and buy a whole 'nother 12 foot piece, you could scarf joint two pieces together that extra one foot that you might need. Put some CA glue on it. You want to fill up that open end. In this case we're using MDF, but whatever you're using.

You could be using PVC for all, who knows? It's another benefit to CA glue is it's gonna stick to PVC pipe, it's gonna stick to metal. So you see, I filled in both of those open faces like that, I got a little bit messy here. I'll hit it with a little bit of kicker. See if we get lucky.

And then, you notice I'm movin' it around so I don't glue it to the table if I have any squeeze out. You let that set for a few minutes. You have a nice clean scarf joint. You've made one long board out of two shorts. Yeah, especially when it's something like a crown molding where it's difficult to get that to stay together.

And then, now that the CA glue that shrinkage over time will be at the end. It won't be right where you put those two joints together. So, the scarf won't open up over time. Basically will become one piece. All right, let's go back to my CA experiment here.

So again, got those two pieces, masking tape and CA together. We can machine it, we can flush trim it, we can do whatever we're gonna do. But then when you're done with that, like double face tape you can pop it open 'cause the CA glue is only bonded to the tape. It's not actually bonded to the wood. Let's do one more thing, 'cause we were talkin' about this off camera a second ago.

Hide glue is cool stuff. And again, sometimes the tip is use the right product. So with hide glue a neat thing about that is it's reversible. So, yellow glue is reversible by like knockin' it apart with a mallet, but it's not easy to do. You'll leave half the material on the joint.

On each side, yeah. So with hide glue, steam will disassemble a hide glue joint. So it's pretty commonly used in instruments, luthiers. And part of that is tweakin' an instrument for another player or doin' repairs in the future, and then also, veneer type applications where you think you veneer a table today, and 50 years from now the table is sound, but the veneer has to be replaced 'cause it's been beat up. So hide glue is also commonly used for that.

And what's nice with this, some hide glues you get in pellet form and then you gotta heat it and in order to be able to use it. It's nice with this that it comes right out of the bottle. That's nice. That's some pretty good stuff. I gotta try that.

I never really used hide glue. I never knew what hide glue was for until you explained it today. It's very, it also gives you a lot of, it's a very, very slow cure time, tack time. Is it water soluble? Yes, I think so.

Well yeah, 'cause it comes apart with steam. So, I think so. Yeah. Gives you a lotta working time. All right.

You know what I like? Tell me. I like Titebond Three lately. I've been really using Titebond Three the last couple years, because I like when it dries it dries nice and dark and because it's also waterproof. Use Titebond Three for indoor/outdoor projects.

I have been asked by a lotta people, can I just default to Titebond Three, 'cause we've got original, Three, we don't have a bottle of Titebond Two out here, and this is waterproof. Titebond Two, which would be right there is water resistant. And then this is for your indoor furniture type pieces. And the answer to that is yes. There's no reason why you can't just do Titebond Three on every project.

It's giving you the most robust. It's also FDA approved for food surfaces like a cutting board, and gives you the most robust joint. It also has pretty good open time, too. Yep. If you're doing finger joints it's really important to have open time 'cause your finger joints, you'll get halfway there, you get a phone call, you come back to 'em and they won't go anywhere.

Yeah, that would be bad. All that glue surface area to make sure you push it in to your bottom surfaces as fast as possible. With Titebond Three I've noticed you've got a lot more working time. Use somethin' like this, like I said, if you're in the middle of it, you go to get a clamp, you come back and you gotta hammer it. You've gotta hammer those joints back into place.

All right so, tips plus choose the right product for what you're doin'. Any other parting words, O wisdom? Always keep the top of your bottles clean. That could mean pullin' it completely apart, cleanin' off that tongue right there, pokin' that out and then stickin' that back in and closin' it. That's like when you clean up the shop at the end of the day, if you've been using a glue bottle all day, take that glue bottle and take two minutes to do that.

It'll save you time. So you can actually use it the next time. The next time you go to do it it's like sweepin' up at the end of the day. Give us, in closing here, give us your, when you have a bottle in your shop that's like half full or half empty, depending on your perspective, how do you treat that on your bench to make sure that you have ready access to the glue in the bottle? It's very complicated.

There it is. So, you do a glue up and you have a bottle that's half empty and you don't have the time, the anticipation to go from here. Often time you go to pick the bottle up you put it back down and everything goes back to the bottom. I keep the bottle laying on its side so that it's always at the ready. So, it's at least that close to the nozzle.

I pick it up, it's ready to go. You have the viscosity and the consistency and the weight all the way halfway down on the long side. When you pick it up it all pushes right into the open nozzle. Ready to go. As opposed to just havin' to take all that time, it might take you about two weeks to go from here to here sometimes.

Sometimes more. Feels like that anyway. Yeah, all right, thank you sir. Thank you. It's a good one.

Thank you, thank you Titebond.