Coming for some help. I am making new cabinet doors for my kitchen. I am using Santos Mahogany. About 90% of my joints are breaking. I am using Titebond 2 that is about 2 years old. It looks like bubbles in the joint. I am applying it with a roller so there should not be any bubbles. I allowed it to dry overnight. I have run all the edges thru the jointer. They are tight without any pressure. Can glue go bad? Do you need to prep mahogany to get it to bond well?
Yes and no, respectively ... buy new, especially if the glue may have been subjected to below freezing temperatures. Regardless, don't take the chance, buy new.
Not a bad idea to shake the bottle on occasion, also ...
Okay I am off to get a new bottle of glue. I am also going to grab a cabinet scrapper. Buddy of mine came over and confirmed the uselessness of the glue. Tomorrow I get to reglue everything after cleaning the glue off the joints. Any good suggestions on removing glue that dries in clumps and flakes off easily.
Gary brought his scrapper and worked on a couple of pieces. I really like hand scrapped look on the mahogany.
Type of doors. They are 5 piece doors with frosted arched top glass panels with bevelled edge.
I've read what others said and totally agree that you should use fresh glue. But.....
This goes back a couple of years and there was kinda of a follow-up post that someone else made a couple months back about using old glue. I don't remember the words exactly but even though the glue may be old (there's gotta be a limit to how old) but the tech at Titebond told him to rap the bottle hard a whole bunch of times to "shock it".
I'm no chemist but I did have an old bottle of Titebond lying around and it didn't look good - color was almost muddy looking. Well, I rapped the bottle solidly against my hand about a dozen times and damned if it didn't just change color and went from being almost gel like - to fluid in the bottle again. There was term they used for that but I don't remember.
I just made so cabinet doors and drawers for my sister's kitchen rehab and no, I didn't use that glue but I did use it on some scraps to test. None of the scrap pieces I glued up broke on the glue line.
So how old was the glue I used...? Over 5 years old and it had been out in my unheated shop for several years - that means it probably was frozen and thawed more than once...
So if you just stirred or shook the hell out of the glue thinking that it's all mixed now - nope, it's not. Shock it now and glue some test pieces together and prove it to yourself. A follow-up post would be nice but make it in a new thread like "Glue Test" or something so it stands out....
You might want to go over to Youtube and search on "sharpening scraper"--seeing it done once is a better than reading about it. Also, if you get the DIY network where you are look for a repeat of Wood Works episode 705, which is the best video on scraper sharpening I've ever seen. In theory you can see the scraper sharpening part at
formatting link
but in practice all I get off the link is an ad--I don't know if that part of the DIY site is temporarily down or what.
Just because you've had it for two years doesn't mean it's *only* two years old. :-)
Look at the date code on the bottle, specifically the first two characters (number + letter). The number is the final digit of the year it was made, and the letter indicates the month (A is January, M is December, I is not used). So, for example, 7K would be October 2007, and 8E would be May 2008.
As long as it's stored at room temperature, it's supposedly good for two years after it was made.
HomeOwnersHub website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here.
All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.