Titebond: Disassembling a Hide Glue Joint
George VondriskaOne of the benefits of hide glue is that it can be easily reversed.
What does it take
Hide glue can be reversed or disassembled by applying hot water and/or steam to the joint. In this case I'm taking apart a mortise and tenon joint, which isn't easy. Because the tenon is inside the mortise getting hot water in there. But there are some tricks.
Application tools
Once you have boiling water on hand (but not on your hands) pour it in a small cup and use something like an acid brush to apply the hot water to the joint. A small syringe, available online, can also provide good control over getting the water in the right spots.
Don't rush it
Let the hot water do its thing. Don't be tempted to rush the process. Yes, if you pound on the joint it will probably come apart, but that will most likely be destructive. Be patient and let the hot water relax the glue. When the joint is ready to release it will, and the joint will easily slip apart.
More info
For more information on Titebond products visit the company's website.
One of the benefits of using hide glue on your woodworking projects is that it's reversible. A lot of luthiers, people who make musical instruments, use hide glue all the time for that reason. You can tweak the instrument later. A lot of furniture makers use it. If you ever need to facilitate a repair, it makes it a lot easier.
So I'm gonna show you, how do we reverse a hide glue joint? This is a mortise and tenon joint, hide glue on both of these. What we're gonna do is boil some water. Once we have hot water, we'll come back and look at what do we need to do to reverse hide glue. All right.
The teakettle is telling me we're ready. What we're looking for here is, in order to dissemble this hide glue joint, we need heat and humidity. So I've got, obviously, water I boiled, and we're gonna do a couple different things here. Using this acid brush, I'm gonna get some water going, and of course, I very intentionally chose a mortise and tenon joint, 'cause this is gonna be a little bit of a pain. The glue is down in the mortise.
So we've also gotta get our water down in the w- mortise. So this could take a little bit of time and a little bit of work. The other thing that can be helpful is a small syringe. So with this, what I can do is open that up, get boiling water in there, try not to burn myself, and what I'm just, what I'm looking for, obviously, is a way to have control over where the water is going. And you can get syringes like this online all day.
And what I'm gonna do, I'm just gonna keep repeating what I'm doing here, and, and this is about time. This is a race that goes to the slow and steady, not the quick. If I grab a mallet and just pound on this, maybe I'll get it apart, but destructively. I don't wanna fracture the thermally modified ash leg. I want the mortise to slip out or the tenon to slip out the same way as it slid in when I put everything together.
Nothing succeeds like success. So again, you can see that hide glue right there. That's, glue that I had originally put on the joint. With the application of hot water, that's softened enough where we could slip that out. So again, it's a unique attribute of hide glue that when we apply steam and water, we can get this to separate.
It's an attribute that hide glue has that very few other glues have.
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