Bound Up On the Topic of Glue

I have never used the right amount of glue , well that’s the way everyone else sees it.

Whenever Publisher Steve Shanesy comes in while I’m gluing, he’s bound to make a comment that I’ve got too much glue on a surface. My reply has always been: Better too much than too little. I’ve never had any finishing problems relating to glue squeeze-out (a great benefit of handplaning your panels) and I haven’t had any joints fail.

Other glue experts would say I use too little glue. I rarely wet both surfaces of a joint (though I’m trying to change my ways on that). I prefer to apply it fairly liberally on one surface then work quickly to get the two surfaces together, especially when I’m using yellow glue.

On Friday we laminated the pieces for the legs on the new LVL workbench. The photo above shows about how much glue I use to join these two surfaces, which make up about 155 square inches on each face.

I poured out a thick bead from the bottle (no fancy glue bottles here) then used a scrap of thin wood about the size of a credit card to trowel the glue to a thin layer. Then I quickly put the two parts together and got a clamp on the lamination at the center.

In the end I looked for a bead of glue squeeze-out at the seam that looks like water beads arrayed on a spider’s web.

Actually, in the end I’m looking for joints that won’t fail. So far, so good.

In the coming days we’ll cut all the joinery for this bench using one setting on our table saw with a dado stack. Then we’ll start bolting it together.

One promising sign that this is going to be a good bench: The 2-1/2″-thick top came out quite flat, stiff and gap-free. And people in the shop are already starting to work on it.

– Christopher Schwarz