Titebond - Keep Your Joints Even

I'm ready to do an edge-to-edge glue-up on this red oak panel, and I wanna emphasize a couple different things. One, when you put your joins together with Titebond, the joint you've created, as long as it's a good joint, is stronger than the surrounding wood. So that is very, very, very important. Also, when we're putting this together, one of the things we can run into is making sure that the boards are even all the way across the joint. So what I'm trying to avoid is having to plane a quarter inch off of this thing after it comes out of the clamps because the faces didn't align when I put it all together.

So I'm gonna give you a couple tricks for that. Going back to just talking about gluing, it's okay to be a one edge gluer. I'm a one edge gluer. But make sure you have a good, uniform coat of glue on that one edge. That's a great coat.

Now, when you're a one edge gluer, you gotta make sure you move quickly, because as soon as we put that glue on and it starts to dry, it's starting to dry. So here's the way to do this. I'm gonna snug these sorta, but I'm not closing the clamps yet. What we're gonna do here in the center is take advantage of cauls. These are dirt cheap, dirt simple.

X means I jointed that edge so it's dead straight. What I don't wanna do is glue the caul to the work, and I've got squeeze out, so it's very, very simple. All that is on there is packaging tape. This caul is gonna go like this. This caul is made exactly the same way.

That's a dead straight edge. Got packaging tape on it. That one's gonna go like this. And the deal with clamp pressure is that we wanna get enough pressure on here that stuff, the cauls and the parallel jaw clamps, can do what they need to do, but they're not restricting the movement. So that's where I want those snug, so they're started to close the joint, but if I get them too tight, when I close these, the cauls aren't gonna be able to do the leveling that they're doing right now.

Then, same, they're still just snug. Out here on the ends, very simple. Take a clamp, bridge the seam, and snug that. Now we're ready to close these clamps. And this approach, cauls in the middle, flag clamps, F-style clamps on the outside to bridge the seams, is so much easier than trying to push on these boards and get everything aligned.

So between the cauls, the clamps, doing it in the right order of operations, and a little bit of Titebond in there, this is now a dead even, amazingly strong glue joint for this red oak panel.