Specialist Wood glue

[Bob Mannix]

"open tube and pour kick-ass glue" maybe an oxymoron though.

[Bruce]

Wouldn't polyurethane adhesive fit that description?

[robgraham]

wood worker might be looking for.

1 Straight out the bottle - no mixing, no wetting 2 Easy clean up - damp cloth at the worst. 3 High strength - goes with the general requirement we all have 4 Fast Set - 30 minutes to usability 5 Clear, easily cleaned up joint 6 Gap fill - in many cases this compensates for poor workmanship, so perhaps it's a bit down the priority list 7 Waterproof - if you want one glue that will do everything then it is a requirement 8 Dismantlable - low priority. Unless you're into violins, etc. how much likelihood ? 9 Flexible - again I'm not sure that this is that relevent to woodwork, though perhaps external wood structures need this, but then joint structure should take expansion and contraction into account.

PVA does 1 to 3 excellently; 4 is a stumbling block on all woodworking glues that I know of as an amateur. I suspect the professionals have glues that are quick setting but I doubt they comply with 1, and businesses are set up to cope with mixing, etc. because quick setting will be a priority to them.

Discuss !

Rob

[Rod]

4 is not a problem (in itself) - you can get cyanoacrylate such as:

accessible to any amateur in numerous guises. The 'wetting' issue is almost irrelevant - it is two part but a momentary spray with the activator is all that is required.

But it does fail on 2, 6, 8.

I don't know where it falls on strength and waterproofness scales - but I'd suggest not too bad on either from my experience.

I almost always use PVA. Recently I have been playing around with polyurethane (how *do* you clean your hands?) for a couple of places which needed serious gap filling. OK - but will still use PVA most of the time.

[Paul Matthews]

Fabulous if you want to be able to undo a join later - eg to repair the inside of a violin. Not so good if it will be somewhere warm and humid and you want it to stay glued.

[Bob Mannix]

Well, I don't know (hence the "maybe") but it's quite often the case that easy to use means less effective as fiddly things professionals use are weakened/made safe to go to the mass market. "One coat gloss", creosote "replacement", for example! Cascamite and similar ranges are still very well thought of but wouldn't sell well compared with squirty PVA adhesive. Bit like proper whipped cream and squirty cream, come to think of it!

[Paul Matthews]

TBH as a general wood glue, there's not a lot to beat PVA in my opinion. Normally if one needs something "better" it is for a very specific reason, and it would help if we knew in what way he was unhappy with PVA. My three choice wood glues are in order of preference PVA, Cascamite and Hide. It will normally be for some specific reason that I would choose to use something other than PVA.

[George]

used on the joints and basically anything made of wood which had joints or bonding wood to wood because there wasn't a substitute for it at the time.

I do remember to seperate the joint it had to be put in a oven to melt the glue or weaken it,so maybe you used a different glue product?

[The Medway Handyman]

Try Titebond 2

[Bruce]

The propellant in squirty cream is laughing gas (nitrous oxide).

Make of that what you will ... ;-)

[Bruce]

You don't have a hot glue gun?

[Steve Walker]

Really? I'll have to try some of that, must be cleaner to use than PU as well!

[Steve Walker]

[The Natural Philosopher]

Superglue is about as good as it gets for nearly all the above.

However, it too has drawbacks, and indeed there is a school of thought that says that glue and wood are really almost incompatible structural techniques. In the case of hardwoods exposed to high humidity variation, there is more than a grain of truth in that. Differential expansion with and across the grain means that its almost impossible to e.g. get a glued mortice and tenon joint to hold up.

Things are better with plywood: thats why they build boats with it. But still not perfect..There is no best glue ..you have a range to choose from depending on what the exact alpication is.

In my toy aeroplane cubpoard exists

White PVA Yellow 'aliphatic' Balsa cement. Thin superglue Thick Superglue Rubber contact adhesive of the solvent sort Latex contact adhesive of the water based sort A modified PVA that dries almost clear for glueing cockpit canopies one Epoxy of the 5 minutes set sort. Epoxy of the 30 minute set sort polyester laminating resin. Hot glue. UHU por. Plastic cement. Car body filler.

EVERY one of them is the 'best' glue to use at some point.

More than half of them on wood to wood joints.

In addition I have tubes of decorators caulk and no more nails type stuff elsewhere, and mirror adhesive.

The carpenters used polyurethane foam glue to make some oak structures for porches. One winter in the cold and damp, and every joint failed. Fortunately they also used coach screws.

I've also used cascamite and aerolite 306 in the past. All good stuff BUT none are perfect, and none will cope with an ill fitting wrongly designed wood joint.

About the best from that perspective is PVA. Straight white glue. it has SOME flexibility and a little gap filling ability. But water kills it. Also hot glue from a gun. Its better than you would imagine, and is really the hobbiest's replacement for a 'glue pot'

The no more nails stuff appears to be a thicker version of decorators caulk: again surprisingly good if you want a flexible gap filler. Mirror glue looks like variation on the theme also. Acrylics seem to take water soaking better than PVA.

epoxy is pretty good, BUT it depends on a good surface to adhere to, and can easily crack off under load. I generally use it with glass colth reinforcement in high stress areas, though its scarcely better than cyanoacrylate with glass.

The ultimate gap giller is car body filler: it adheres better than epoxy, and fills huge gaps cheaply, however it is also brittle, and cant take a lot of wood movement under it..it will fail at the wood-to-glue joint as will most *brittle* glues that don't penetrate the wood surface.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Bitch to wipe clean.

And not as good a gap fller as you think.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Totally agree.

[The Natural Philosopher]

A faster setting and more brittle version of PVA essentially.

It SANDS better than PVA, but it can crack and fall apart.

[The Natural Philosopher]

yes, Its a mildly foaming polyurethane type IIRC

Expensive, nearly as flexible as PVA, waterproof, and fast grabbing. I don't rate its gap filling that well, and its no panacea either.

And its a total bitch to clean up.

[Paul Matthews]

Completely overlooked hot glue - it has its uses, but for bigger joints I have not found it terribly strong. The main rason I would use hot glue is the quick set.

The biggest thing I use hot glue for is holding wires in place behind panels.