Originally Posted by Matt Day
Poly Urethane. Gorilla Glue is one.
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Poly Urethane. Gorilla Glue is one.
Contributor
Mark,
That cant hook test seems to tell the tale. You've reminded me about a recent article in FWW where the author, a furniture maker, makes the case for people to reconsider the common biases against PU glue. Do you have any tips you could share on how you deal with the foamy squeeze out, and how you handle clean up in general when using PU glue or epoxy?
Edwin
Contributor
You need to read the book "Understanding Wood". The lighter grain wood pieces are wide and wood warped exactly where the book would show it it will. Wood moves with changes in humidity. All wood moves, because it moves like 3X more parallel to the end grain than perpendicular to the end grain. With a part that's wide like that the differential movement caused it to warp and that made the glue fail. Most issues people here have with warping and glue failure would have been avoided if they understood and accounted for wood movement. To put it in perspective, I live in the desert where it's pretty dry all year. Humidity goes from maybe 6% most of the year to maybe 60% outside in the rainy season. I built a 37" wide kitchen table years ago with flat sawn red oak. It will move in width over 1/4" over the course of a year. I built it to accommodate that movement. 25 years later it's still fine and I expect it will be fine for many more years. I also built night stands and a dresser out of Quarter sawn sapele. It's quite stable. The side are glued up pieces of solid Sapele that fasten to the upper and lower frames in sliding dovetails. this is because when I calculated the wood movement I could see as much as 1/8" movement from very dry to humid. I didn't want the furniture to tear itself apart over time so I designed it so that whenever I fasten parts together where the grain will change directions, I did it in a way to enable the wood to breath. Funny, you hear marketing a lot on furniture polish that will "FEED" the wood which is silly. However we should all be designing furniture that enables wood to move.
TB-III at 3-1/2 years of near-daily (yes seriously) use. Just sayin' . . .
Marla at 1 year.JPG
Re-oiled with mineral oil whenever it appears dry (about every two months). Resurfaced by me a couple of times (scrub the surface and let dry, a run or two through the drum sander at 220, re-oil and return). The way my SIL entertains . . . by all rights, this board should be dead
Last edited by glenn bradley; 03-15-2018 at 5:01 PM.
"A hen is only an egg's way of making another egg".
– Samuel Butler
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Joe and Glenn,
I read Hoadleys book as the bible. The unfortunate fact you have to realize is that the consumer (maybe your customer or not) doesnt read, nor care, about the principles in that book. And no amount of preparation and wood choice, and grain orientation, and education of your customer, is going to offset the abuse and neglect that the "big box" consumer is going to inflict on your preciously chosen piece.
It is of no surprise to me That glenn's board still looks good. Anyone who would take the pains to fabricate a board, with inlay, for their own use, is going to use good material, best practices, focus on joinery, AND take care of their board. The boards I mention in my torture test, TO THIS DAY, HAVE NEVER BEEN RE-OILED. They left our shop with a coat of 1:6 mineral oil and bees wax. They have never been touched since. I will guarantee you that the people who buy the millions of cutting boards that are churned out of garage shops daily NEVER re-oil them.
Hoadleys book has nothing to do with my tool handle test. It was a test of glue line failure due to hard use and some would say gross neglect. None the less we have people "thinking" that TBIII is a bullet proof exterior glue. It is not.
Me telling my customers who want a solid wood counter top, regardless of how much I tell them its a bad idea, are never going read, and adhere to, he sound principles in Hoadleys book. Its why we have contracts and disclaimers.
What you need to do is glue up a board with TBIII and put it through its paces like it will see when its sold at a shop or a craft fair. Then test one with PU, then one with Epoxy.
How each of us treats our own work is irrelevant.
Last edited by Mark Bolton; 03-15-2018 at 5:20 PM.
Contributor
No glue would have held that joint shut. You can plainly see that the boards used would have cupped in that exact manner. The only thing they a different adhesive would have changed is the nature of the failure.
Contributor
There are people here far more knowledgeable than me . My only advice would be oversized component based construction. Where you build sub assemblies which are slightly oversized and then will be dimensioned to final size reducing the amount of glue ups/assemblies that will have to be cleaned up manually. A cutting board is easy, glue it up with edgeged rough sawn blanks, scrape the foam/squeazout from one face, plane, flip plane, and done. More complex assemblies there is going to be some inconvenient manual work to deal with it. I dont use tape or anything else unless its absolutely a bear to cleanup (an inside corner would be reasonable to tape).
I think a hard part in the hobby world (of course where I started) is the Norm notion of bringing things to final size and then painstakingly gluing them up to allow for hand tool and hand machine cleanup. His model was to make things possible with modest tools (his shop in the end was far from modest) Its much easier to clean up your edges, glue your work up with dead rough faces, then plane or bring the sub assemblies down to thickness. Even if your limited with a 12" planer and your making a 40" wide table top. If your material allows make sub assemblies at 12" wide and run them through the planer, then glue to 4 subs to each other with dowels (dead clean face alignment) and hand surface 4 joints instead of the whole top.
Things like that. We have to do stuff like that every day because we dont have a 52" sander.
Member
Glenn's is a great example of quality, but I am not sure it is a fair comparison to an end grain glueup. Everyone loves the end grain look, but how many painstakingly go thru their stock like Joe suggests for an end grain project where you are dealing with maybe 100 or more little pieces? I sure would not have wanted to be the guy that had to re-build that 5" end grain counter top in the thread Mark posted.
Last edited by Brad Shipton; 03-16-2018 at 12:18 PM.
Contributor
I hurt over that one for days and it wasnt even my job. The material cost alone.... gosh. Major major bummer.
Member
I have made a number of cutting boards, and we use 3 of them in our own house (all endgrain). None is soaked in water. None goes to dishwasher. Once salad is cut I rinse the surface and wipe/dry with a paper towel. I oil them once every month or two. So, its fair to say we don't abuse any of our cutting boards. Two have failed in the same manner. Were built at different times using different batch of TB III.
Contributor
I dont think TBIII is the culprit other than the marketing and the adoption of it as "the standard" in the hobby and craft world but that extends straight on through even into the post I linked to.
For me personally. Its not anywere near the best glue. But TB super and TB original have served me without fail.
Any glue that allows movement is going to bite you in the A** eventually. Because the movement is going to be more than your customer is willing to accept, or more than the glue line can handle, and then you will have a costly failure.
Contributor
IMO. It’s too thin, end grain cutting boards should be thicker.
Bumbling forward into the unknown.
[OP]
Member
Because the pieces were 1.5-2" wide instead of 1" wide?
Contributor
To me it looks like the op glued up end grain to long grain. But in looking at the photo from my phone so it hard to tell..
[OP]
Member
No, that's not the case. It's all end grain facing up
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