Gary H Phillips
Posts: 46
Joined: 2007-05-06
Location: Seekonk, MA
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Good morning,
Well, I tried the vacuum press yesterday, I made up a series of thicker pine boards out of thinner ones. In our shop, we generall use either Hot Glue (hide) Fish Glue, which is basically Lapage's Mucsalage (sp?) that one used in school; the one with the angled rubber tip, or Franklin Tite Bond III which I think is ok. I'd rather use the first two as they don't creep at all.
For the first gluing, I used fish glue like I would normally if I were clamping. I usually leave the clamps on for at least 4-6 hours sometimes over night. I released the vacuum from the press yesterday after 5 hours and the glue was only just set up and the joints started to let go. I put them back in the press and left it over night and this morning it is fine, but the glue still isn't hard. I'm assuming that it is like this because in a vacuum things that need air to dry have a problem doing so.
To those that have done a fair amount of this, when you are using a water based glue such as the above three, do you find that it takes long to set up?
I did notice that there was still 100 pounds of pressure in the tank when I came in this morning and I turned it off at 5:00 pm last night so there isn't much leakage. I'm not even sure it was just the press using the air as there are other hoses that might leak some too; I didn't think to disconnect them.
I am going to be doing some veneering soon as I have some 4 x 8 sheets of maple coming. I am going to be putting a layer down across the grain and then with the grain the same as what was done at the Wurlitzer Factory back in the 20's...only they used hot glue then. Is a Tite Bond III to be recommended for this? I've also used that in the past for this type of banding but on a small scale. I'm a little worried about the tite bond setting up too soon while we're gluing all the parts; the fish glue has a very long open time and it is VERY strong, on the area of 3200 LBS shear strength!
Any insight would be nice from any of you with more experience than I.
Thanks in advance,
Gary
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