Help on How to Glue-Up and Mount this Project

[darrell huntsman]

question 1: Do any of you have suggestions on how to do a glue of the following project so that the blocks remain in line? This will be 20 blocks tall by 20 blocks wide (3.5" X 3.5" blocks) to mount to a wall.

question 2: Would you mount this to a piece of plywood or just glue the pieces together?


Any suggestions and thoughts would be appreciated.

260898

or

260899

[Denny Rice]

First of all this is going to be very tough to glue up because all 4 sides of every block I am seeing is not flat and parallel on the sides. When I enlarge both pictures you can see daylight and shadow areas where the wood is not the same height and/or width. If it were me I would glue this in sections. Maybe divide the project into quarters then after it cures, glue both quarters into haves, then glue the entire project togeather. This is going to take awile but I think a good hand plane could fix your sides for gluing but your going to have to be careful not to remove too much because if you do then your blocks willl not be the same size and the project will not look right. I think trying to glue 400 blocks at once is asking for trouble. I like what you got going on there with the blocks being different heights kinda gives it a very artistic look but all 4 sides of every block need to be good and flat before gluing.

[George Gyulatyan]

Looks like a rather shallow quadratic diffuser. In many videos I've seen where people build such diffusers, they seem to just apply glue to the bottoms and stick it to a plywood panel, no clamps. Honestly, now sure how well that would hold, especially given that it can get pretty heavy.

What I'd do is glue them up side grain to side grain a row at a time. Make sure you do this on a perfectly flat surface to register the pieces against, and perhaps use cauls from the sides to keep the row straight. When tightening the clamps, the pieces are likely to shift up, so you could tap them with a mallet to level the bottoms.
Once you've glued up each rows, then you can glue them to one another.

Once all that's done, you can glue and screw the whole assembly to a plywood backer.