Glue Joints Woodworking - Which edge joint to use?

hi i'm rob cosman welcome to my shop today we're going to talk about edge glue joints because you're not always going to find wide boards like this most frequently you're going to have to glue two or more boards in order to get the wood you want there are decisions to be made based on what joint type of glue gonna walk you through all of it stay with us i'm rob cosman and welcome to my shop we make it our job to help take your woodworking to the next level if you're new and you haven't subscribed please do so hit the notification bell so you'll receive alerts when we release a new video and anytime we use a special tool we'll always leave a description down below alright let's get to work lots of options when you're choosing the glue the idea is to choose the glue that you're most comfortable with and it's right for the job so i'm going to go through i'll show you some i'm going to talk to talk to you specifically about the ones that i use the we'll start with the regular so here's yellow glue called aliphatic resin it's common everybody knows about it and uses it the downside to it is it loses a lot of its strength at about 120 degrees fahrenheit you can check with the manufacturer on that to verify it but i've had projects fail so i no longer use that one in fact that what i use now is titebond three this also has absolutely no water resistance type on three gives you a little more open time that means that when you spread your glue you've got a little more time before it starts to get skin over and not be very effective it's also water resistant not for building a boat but it's good for outdoor use so i it has all the properties of this glue plus the fact that it's waterproof so that's why i use it now this is a polyurethane glue and i use it in some applications it tends to expand almost like expanding foam so you have to be aware of that and it does it here just about every material that you can find but it's also one of those things that you start using it next thing you know you've got it all over you so i don't use a lot of it but i do use it in specific applications where i'm having to glue ceramic metal anything like that to wood this is cyanacrylate it comes in three different cons four different consistencies actually thin which is a consistency of water and then medium that would be more like a syrup and then there's thick that would be almost like molasses and i think you can even get a thicker one than that so this comes in handy because it's instant especially the thin one but it has some restrictions the thin one only works when the two pieces are tight it works through capillary action i don't really i don't use it i don't use the thick stuff in place of this type of a glue because i find it doesn't hold as well but there are applications with a thin one that i think surpass all other glues and that's when i uh when you're putting a box together something like this and you've got a tight joint where it would be awkward to try to glue all four corners at the same time you can put this whole thing together and then just hit it with the thin cyan acrylate and it'll wick all around there and it just does a great job that way then there's epoxy epoxy almost always comes as two-part and has to be mixed before it sets up what's nice about epoxy is that you uh you can get it with a five-minute set you can get it with a 15-minute set you can get with an hour long set so if you need the extra open time or you want to be able to arrange your pieces after you put it together or actually say i wouldn't use it on a big job just because of the expense of it i'm going to show you a better option than that but it's it's relatively expensive for the amount of glue that you get but in certain applications it's great and as i mentioned you have to thoroughly mix it before it's activated and will start to cure we have hot melt glue so this is what i would call a temporary glue although in certain applications it can be it would be considered permanent i use it if i'm just building a mock-up and i want to put something together temporarily just to see what it's going to look like it's quick and relatively inexpensive so this is the glue that i use if i'm doing a lamination where you've got a large surface that you have to deal with and you need lots of open time i think they tell you that the open time is almost an hour on this but i found that much after 20 minutes and it starts to skin over so i wouldn't go a full hour now this is a powder and you mix it with water and i'll warn you that you put the powder into the water not the water into the powder if you put the water into the powder you'll never get it mixed you put the powder into the water and you just continue to mix it as you add more and more and it'll work so get the right glue don't get overwhelmed by it i think if you're stuck with that and uh maybe this and this you'd probably be all set but of course you're gonna have to match it to whatever it is that you're building but there's lots of glues out there and it's worth doing a little bit of research to find out what one is going to be best suited for you if you have a specific application outside of normal wood the wood gluing when we talk about edge joint what we're talking about is gluing two pieces or two or more pieces of wood together along their long grain so these are two pieces of taurified maple this would be end grain against long grain what we're talking about is gluing long rain to long grain and it represents an extremely strong joint i glued together two pieces of pine the glue joints right in the middle to try to give you demonstrate this so i broke i if i break that it did not break on the glue joint okay here's your glue joint over there and over there in fact no part of the glue joint actually let go so it creates a bond that is stronger than the wood itself which means you usually don't need to have anything reinforcing it other than just the glue but there's a couple of characteristics that are essential in order for that joint to work well so when i'm doing it what i'm looking for is two straight edges and i want them to be square when they come together i don't want any gaps i want to have them as close to being flush as possible meaning you don't want one sticking up or popped up in the middle or out at the end that's just going to make it very difficult and in the process of leveling it if you've got a high spot in a low spot then you're going to lose that much over the entire area so you've got to be careful about that so in addition to what i mentioned the other thing is and what i think is even more important and i'm not so sure people pay enough attention to it is the continuity of the grain so i would mix mix and match and try to find it so that that joint almost disappears just because of the way the grain runs and this obviously would not be a very good match you've got dark and light and it's quite obvious that the joint is right there there may be times when you want to accentuate it but usually if i'm trying to get a larger piece of one particular type of wood i want that to look like one continuous piece that's the reason why i pointed out if you can get nice wide boards like that i always leave them that way there's an old wives tale that people used to adhere to where they would take a board like that cut it in narrow strips flip one flip each one around which would make a complete mess of the nice figure in the wood and really did not solve any problems particularly now that we live in homes that are climate controlled and your moisture content is not going to move very much at all from season to season if you're going to glue up large panels you're going to have to have some form of a clamp there's two options the most common would be what are called pipe clamps they come three-quarter in half these are three-quarter these are pretty standard find them just about anywhere buy a black pipe clamp a pipe get it threaded on one end and you can pick up the clamp sections at any hardware or you can get f clamps i'll deal with the pipe clamps first so if i'm going to glue up three boards like that i'm gonna probably put one clamp here i could get away with three but i'm gonna go with four so i'm gonna go one here one here one here one here but i've got to alternate them and by alternate them what i mean is one on top one on bottom so i'll space out two like that put these in and by the way there's two different types of pipe clamps that you can get and i'll show you and i'll also tell you my recommendation i don't think i have any right here actually i got this one so this one has a cam on the back so to release it you pull up on the cam and then when pressure is applied that cam will has teeth on it and it'll bite into the steel into the pipe but it also leaves gouges like this which end up in metal splinters i much prefer this style that has half of four or five pieces of steel they're spring loaded and they have a tendency to catch much faster now they do the same thing as far as tearing up the steel but you'll find that these have a tendency to slip when you least want it and these always grab so i would go with those and they tend to be the more expensive by the way so here's how we would do our spacing probably move this down to about here now the reason you want to do this is because the pipes have the clamps have a tendency to pull in one direction meaning if you put them all on one side they're going to go there if they were all in the top they'd have one tendency to cup the board like this so this alternates the pressure so in doing that i would put this one here and you can count on the pressure going out at about a 45 degree angle from the clamp head so that in that case you can see that i could easily get away with three here but i'm gonna go with four so that one would sit there and work with this piece of cardboard on my bench and one here and this one would be out there evenly spaced now if you do this the one you have to be aware that that's going to leave marks in your wood so you've got to either put some kind of a protective strip in there or you can do this which i find is a really good help i've taken hardwood dowel and i've split it in half and then i clamp or tape it in place just so that it's not falling on me when i'm trying to work especially under the pressure of having glue drying if you put it on your an edge like that it'll help put the pressure right down through the middle of the board so instead of allowing the clamp to pull on the inside or on the outside because it makes contact on the top of the radius all that pressure will go right down through the center of the board and do a much better job of holding it together you can make up a bunch of these and then just have them when you need them so i would take the time to have four uh two of those in every spot where you have the clamp and that's probably going to guarantee your best success coming from this now if you don't go with pipe clamps what i have found and as the longer i've done this the more i've realized probably apply way more clamping pressure than is required in fact if you're having to squeeze the life out of it it's probably because your two edges aren't straight or something's not fitting properly so i've come to like these f-clamps made by bessie a whole lot more they're easier to handle they are not capable of applying the same amount of pressure which keeps you from overdoing it but you can come in here if you buy the good ones they have six serrated edges so it's kind of an i-beam type affair and there's a serrated edge here here and here and the same thing on the other side which simply means that when you want that to lock it's got a better chance of biting the less expensive clamps only have a serrated edge right here and back there and they're the ones that tend to slide so i would come in here like this on the end and i want to make sure that i'm i've got the head of the clamp or the part that bites and back here right in the middle of the board put that one on there i might go with four even with this and you just want to get just enough squeeze out to know that you didn't starve the joint of glue you don't want so much that you've got a mess running all over the place and you don't want so little that you don't see any glue coming out because then you may end up having not applied enough so those are the two diaper clamps that i would suggest and i really favor the f clamps okay this is the part of the process that i don't think folks spend enough time on this is the part that people are going to it's going to catch their attention more so than anything else and that is the continuity of the grain so first thing i would do is lay those pieces out and put them together now this is aspen it's very blonde it's almost hard to see but even still i want to try to get a nice match so what i would do is typically take one board and find out which edge or which face looks best not really any distinguishing marks on any of them if i had a knot or any kind of a blemish then i would keep that on the bottom side but this piece they all look to be equally plain i'll stick with that so now it's just a matter of switching around so you've got a little bit of something going on here which doesn't pair up very well with that side so i might switch that now i've got some lines that are running down through here and i'm almost got the same thing going on on this piece so that would make for a good joint over here so we've got rather straight lines coming down here but we've got a little bit of figure right there and that's not really very complimentary so if we switch it around like that that's better flip it over like i said this is hard to see because it's so white i don't know whether that's any better that one definitely isn't i think i'll go back to this one now i could also possibly move this over here since i'm only gluing up three boards that doesn't do me any favors nor does that no no i think i was better off back over here and of course this is subjective okay so as far as looks i think that's probably going to be the best solution but now once this is glued up i'm going to have to plane it down so i want the grain to be running the same direction if at all possible so if i can't tell by feeling it i would actually take the time to go in and just plane that surface lightly with the hand plane and find out if i have one direction that works better than another and if i do then i'd label it put an arrow in the direction that i want to plane and then i've got to match these other ones up to it as well if not particularly if you're dealing with woods like this tend to be really easy to tear if you go the wrong direction so you're trying to plane this and you've got a nice smooth surface here and here and this one's going the wrong way and it's all ripped up and torn so that's something you need to pay attention to when i build my bench and it's made out of several pieces of wood i actually go in and i plane the top edge of each piece and i mark it so that when i'm planing the whole thing it's much easier when all the grain is running the same direction that's not a bad idea to employ in any secret circumstance where you can have multiple pieces once you've laid out your board so that it looks good then you want to go and identify it so that as you're moving boards around and getting things ready you can always come back to it so if you just draw a big triangle in pencil across the joint and it doesn't matter what happens there's only one way to put that back together so now i've got two glue joints and rather than try to do two at the same time i'm just going to do one so i'm going to look at this and if your power jointer is set up properly you should be able to have a good joint i'm going to show you how we can make this one even better but that looks to be okay i don't see any gaps so let's get ready to glue that one up and i'm actually going to do it and show you how i would go about the process but i want to get a piece of cardboard i don't like gluing on my bench if you take the time when you're doing this and to do it carefully it's going to save you a whole bunch of time at the other end if you glue these up and they're misaligned now you've got to take a whole lot of material off it's not worth the effort so we're going to spend a little bit of time now i've got some half dowels to protect it to protect the edge and to help distribute the pressure properly i'll use some painters tape just to hold them in place set these up so top every other one will be opposite those to sit there without falling over so okay now that's not going to sit there very well so i'll move it over you want a nice even coat of glue i only need to do one side i use my finger allow my thumb to keep everything right in the middle meaning my thumb is rubbing on the inside edge keeping that so that the bead of glue stays right down the middle you want an even coat make sure there's glue on all of the wood you don't want it running all over the place it just makes it difficult to get rid of afterward be nice if that thing would stay put might be asking too much come on clamp okay now i'm going to start out here and i'll just use my fingers to get that flush don't want to be too tight just yet just enough to pull it together the clamp helps to keep the pressure right down through the middle so the next one's going to go across the top i didn't do a very good job of line those up but they're close enough now you want to be careful because these get marked up over time and it'll end up as it pulls it'll end up leaving scratches on here so you may need to just put something there temporarily to keep that up off of the board now i need to get this flush so from down here i can just lift a little bit until that makes okay that's good that's good then we'll pull this one in this one's high so i'm going to pull it up like so that's flush oh i need to come up off of here so i'll just hold it line this up okay snug that up same amount of pressure on all of them just eyeball that not pulling it too much you don't need a ton of pressure and you want a little bit of squeeze out there's not a ton there but there's enough that i know i don't have a starved joint so if i've got the third piece that i had on there i'll wait for this to dry give it at least a half an hour then i only have to manage one glute wet joint at a time the first time i was shown this i didn't believe it the illness actually introduced us to it i say us because it was in a beginning woodworking class at byu and it's called a rub joint meaning you don't use any clamps you just simply put glue on there you rub it for a didn't take very long until it no longer moves and then just let it sit it's actually surprisingly strong now the problem is that if it was of any length it would be a little bit difficult to do but these pieces are a little bit over 12 inches long so i'll show you how it is so a couple pieces of red oak not that the species matters apply the glue like we did make sure you got an even coat and then just put the other piece on suppose you can put it in the vise and make it a little bit easier give you a third hand then just move that forward and back and it'll start to stick in fact it won't take very long and you won't be able to move it i remember him demonstrating it and he just took two small pieces of wood together it wouldn't emily was talking to us he held them and didn't seem very long and then he handed it to several of us and see if we can break it and we couldn't break it so that's about all it'll take now i would just set that aside and come back and try to break that at some point after 30-40 minutes of drying and we'll just see how tough it actually is now if you have a long glue joint or multiple boards you want to save some time you can always use some form of an alignment so you can use dowels you can use splines you can use biscuits i find it just as easy to use a long spline providing that you don't mind or you're not going to be having to look at the spline from the end that's the only downside but i think this is the more convenient of all the methods to do so the first thing i've got to do is cut some spline material it doesn't have to be very long i'm going to suggest half an inch on this so i've got some eighth inch baltic birch plywood set the fence for half an inch that splitter is actually sticking up too high but i got to take it off for this next procedure now providing that's going to fit which it should that's an eighth of an inch blade and that's an eighth of an inch baltic birch now we want to be up just a little bit better than a quarter of an inch i'll actually test that i want to put this in the middle in this case eyeballing it is enough i also want to hold it tight against the fence so that i don't have it i'm not having to do it by hand and i want to make sure that it's going to be right down the middle what good is it to cut an alignment slot in there if it's not going to be right on so some form of a feather board is helpful it should do lock it move that in just a little bit get a piece of scrap first and see if that so we need a quarter of an inch in each piece that's a little better than a quarter so that'll do just going to check and make sure that's a little bit sloppy we'll try it and see i'm gonna keep my good face against the fence now i've got some sawing burr on the back so i'm just going to get a sanding block to get that off you could always make your spline material out of solid wood but the grain is going to be running opposite of the way you want for any strength that's why plywood is so much easier that could be a little better fit but it might do the job now try it first wouldn't hurt to cut a little chamfer along there too to help that go together now the problem with this there's just enough slop to almost defeat the purpose so i'm going to suggest that we find another piece of plywood we want to fit a little snugger than that in order for it to do the job however once we've done that i find it easier if you actually go in and just glue that in place first on one piece so that you're not trying to juggle both it's also going to help strengthen the joint if you need a little bit of extra strength so if that's already done make sure you don't have any glue left in the corner in here and then once that's all glued up you can go ahead apply all your glue to this piece put it together and clamp it but let's see if i can't find something that fits a little bit better than that if you try to be close and you're woodworking or really close this is the type of thing that's going to drive you crazy so i use a lot of baltic birch plywood 8 inch and as i went around the shop and checked this piece comes in at one one five this piece comes in at one two three and all over the board so even that piece isn't going to be thick enough interestingly enough the kerf which should have been one one one two five came in at almost tenth hour over so what i'm going to do is go in i'm going to make some we only need it for alignment purposes i'm going to make it out of solid wood which means it's not going to strengthen the joint much however we've got lots of surface area there anyway so it won't matter now i'm going to cut that says 135 but i never want to rely on actual measuring i'd rather be able to go in there and fit it so what i'm going to do i'm going to go over and i'm just going to snap off the end of this so that i can actually put that piece right in if i need to make it a little smaller i can just move the fence over while it's fairly short all right so if i go in there that's a little too tight so we'll move this over slightly now that's a little bit snug and over a long distance like that a lot of resistance bring it down a little more that's better now hopefully we can cut it and keep it exactly that width now instead of cutting another piece i'm going to go over and cut this into segments and we'll just place it so that we use up or we go the full distance also we need to cut this down to half inch so now i could have made enough so that it wasn't continuous but it's only for alignment purposes so the fact that there's a bit of a gap in between them is not going to matter now we make sure there's no debris that's going to interfere and as i said you could go in and glue these in ahead of time although it's not needed for extra glue strength there's plenty of strength just on the wood to wood contact that little chamfer that we cut will help get that started put that together and then check it that's flush flush plush flush you could do multiple boards as long as the glue you're using gave you the amount of open time and you could put them all together at once now the only thing is if you're if that's going to be shown then you may not want to do it this way and there are other methods you can use a biscuit joiner you can even use dowels but that's a lot of extra work i think the spline method is the best okay for this last one we're going to do it using the hand plane and we're going to do something called a sprung joint which simply means that when it goes together it's going to be tight out on the ends and there's going to be a slight gap in the middle very very slight but first thing we want to do is improve this by planing it so we get rid of those little ripple marks so anytime you use a jointer it's a rotary cutting action it's going to have a little scallop or ripple marks all the way along that board we can make it a little bit better if we want so we'll put this in the vise use a plane with a freshly sharpened blade get that blade parallel to the sole and retract it and as you're pulling the blade in you can always make a little more of an adjustment i'm going to pull it all the way in so it's not projecting at all and as i plane i'm going to start spinning the adjuster and i want to watch to see where the first bit of shaving comes out because i want it to be across the width of the board seems to be all right okay now i'm purposely going to create a little hollow so i'm going to come in here to the near the middle and i'm going to start go about 12 inches or so and then lift the plane up while in in a forward motion come back a little farther and go forward a little farther lifting the plane up in a forward motion so the shaving ends and doesn't leave a what i would call a skin tag come back and do that again very light pass now this time i'm going to go full length okay make sure i can't feel any start stop marks and we'll set that aside and we'll do the same thing on this one i'll go full lengths first to make sure that we're free of any defects on the surface now we'll come in here about a foot and a little longer each time coming back a little farther and going head a little farther it's not quite all the way come back in here and take a little more off hopefully you're keeping things square now let me just run my fingers over that you know i feel a little bit of a transition mark right there so i'm going to take one more complete pass now we'll set this piece on by lining up the marks now i definitely don't want a bump in the middle so if i if this pivots we're in trouble but it doesn't it touches on the outside edges now just curious to see how much it's how much of a gap we have so i'm going to use my feeler gauge and the smallest one i have here is one and a half thousandths of an inch so i'll see if i can put that in there okay i can pull that out if i come out here it pulls the whole thing so i know i'm making contact out there in the edges yeah that's good so when we clamp it we're sure to keep those edges tight we've got an ever so slight gap in the middle now i just want to make sure that we didn't throw those edges out of square so i'm going to take a straight edge and put it on here and that lines up if that was tilting one way or the other then i know we were no longer square so now that's nice and flat we can go ahead do the same type of a glue up we'll put our our little half dowels on here clamp that together with some glue and we'll get an even better joint probably one that you can't see with the naked eye but you're going to feel better about it if you enjoy my method of work and like my style of teaching click on any one of these videos to help take your woodworking to the next level now i've always said better tools make the job so much easier if you click on the icon with the plane and the chisel it'll take you to our website introduce you to all of our tools that we actually manufacture right here as well as our workshops both in person and online good luck

Channel: RobCosman.com

Views: 17,760

Rating: 4.9850187 out of 5

Keywords: glue joints woodworking, glue joints, rub joints woodworking, woodworking glue joints, glue only wood joints, glue-ups, woodworking diy, woodworking glue, woodworking glue up, woodworking glue up tips, edge glue boards, edge glue wood, spring joint woodworking, wood joint glue, wood joints

Id: tD1gSAYMTYQ

Length: 38min 30sec (2310 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 03 2020