Long open time glue recommendations?

[dcarter636]

All of my practical experience with wood glue can be summed up as Tite Bond, Elmer's, polyester resin, cyanoacrylates, and Gorilla glue. None of these are going to work very well for my current challenge.

As some of you know I have had a baby crib in process and now that the garage gets above 55^oF work resumes. The side rails are a particularly daunting assembly where 23 M&T spindles need to to be glued on both ends before closing, adjusting for racking, and clamping. I'm guessing that an open time of at least 15 minutes is needed for this with two people working frantically.

Suggestions?

[admin]

For lengthy glue ups, I find that it's a better option to put some glue into a second container (spray paint tops, etc) and apply it with a Popsicle stick. If you keep the glue moving, it shouldn't set too badly. You'll lose the glue you don't use, but it's much better than having the whole bottle sitting open for a lengthy period of time.

I have used Gorilla for similar stuff, and it worked nicely.

[cabinetman]

Use Dap Plastic Resin Glue (urea-formaldehyde).

[Leo Voisine]

How about 60 minute 2 part epoxy ?

You can get that in large containers at Lowes.

[rrich]

I would use any of the Tite Bond extensible types. White bottle, red and black letters. They are available at my local woodcraft.

[rhull]

A good epoxy. I had a disaster scenario trying to glue up the side of a crib with Titebond and ended up having to clean all the joints and then using epoxy, which really set things back. The epoxy was so much easier with the long open time.

[sawduster]

Urea formaldehyde stays open longer than most of your yella glues, but I think I would opt for slow setting epoxy.

[Ruffnek]

Either plastic resin or epoxy.

[dcarter636]

Sounds like I need to get some urea-formaldehyde, some slow setting epoxy, and do some test bonds to see how it goes with them.

I've vacillated over whether to apply the BLO and shellac before or after assembly. Doing the finish before assembly would alleviate concern about cleaning up epoxy dribbles and squeeze-out.

[wisardd1]

Here is a recommendation for you that will allow you to use almost any glue you want.

Take at least a four inch wide stock by the length of the area that your spindles are going to be set. Dado the width of the spindles across the 4 inches and do so across the width all the way up the board so you have 32 dados (or whatever number)
all the way up the length. Visual: you have a board 4 inches wide with 32 dads from end to end. Then rip 3/4 inch (or however big your spindles are) in to strips. You will end up with 4-6 long strips with 32 dados in each strip. Place two of them on your work bench about two inches from the top and the bottom of the spindles. visual: one for the top, one for the bottom. The spindles should fit right in and hold it like a brace. Take two more and place them on top of the spindles at the same place: Visual: you will have 32 spindles that look like they have cross bars top and bottom. attack the the dados pieces together either by screw or tape. Visual: They will all be braced together and it will look like a garden fence. Now you can pick up the hole piece as one piece and make sure it fits your mortises. If it does, you can glue the who thing at once without the spindles driving you nuts by not staying in place. Makes it a snap for glue up, you just have to take the times to set up this jig so you can glue the mortise and tenons all at once.

dale

[triplefreak]

None of the above. Plan your gluing accordingly. Do one side first, then the other. If you need more than 30 minutes open time, you're doing something wrong.

[dcarter636]

Dale, that is pretty much how we figured it too. Two parallel rails, each with 23 cross cut dadoes, cross tied together at the ends to hold the spindle array initially parallel and square. We will be checking the fit of each tenon and then lay them into the fixture to keep them from getting mixed up, that's happened in the excitement of glue-up before. I hadn't thought to use wide tape to tie them together but I will now.

A nice additional feature of that alignment fixture that it holds the spindles up off the bench while painting the four sides of 46 1/4"x1/2"x3/4" tenons with a thin film of glue.

TF, I guess I'm just slow and anal about excess glue squeeze out on heirloom pieces. Painting glue on 46 rectangular tenons and inside 46 dinky mortises is a bit busy for my liking. If it takes 15 seconds each (for four sides) then that adds up to about 23 minutes plus dinking around to square up and final clamp the assembly. Figuring that with one person painting glue onto the tenons and another painting the mortises we should be able to do it in about fifteen minutes.

[rrich]

Mar 17, 2010 18:58:43 GMT -6 dcarter636 said:

Figuring that with one person painting glue onto the tenons and another painting the mortises we should be able to do it in about fifteen minutes.

You only need to paint the mortises with glue. This helps to prevent squeeze out.