Originally Posted by
Warren Mickley
I was responding to this quote in the previous post:
For any glue up of size, it's very difficult to keep the glue liquid long enough to get the parts together. I can't imagine how our ancestors glued up dovetails with hot hide glue. They must have put a lot of urea into the glue. Or maybe the dovetails were mechanically strong enough that t didn't matter about the glue.
Or maybe they had more experience using hide glue.
Additives in hide glue to slow down evaporation also make it make it vulnerable to gain moisture and get gummy when the humidity is high, making for weak joinery. Yellow glue and white glue make the joint much more difficult to disassemble for repair. Nobody wants to restore stuff like that, so more likely to be thrown away.
As Andrew Hughes said yesterday:
If my work were to survive long enough for a restoration someone's not going to be happy.