Gluing the Top
2009.06.06
The workbench top consists of sixteen boards, glued together in sets of four. Normally the entire top would be glued together, but as I don’t expect to stay in this rental house forever, I need the workbench to break down into small enough pieces to move out of the basement. I am still tinkering with exactly how I will keep the sections tightly held together.
This evening I started the first glue-up, with some trepidation. First I did a dry run with the clamps. Then I hauled out the gallon of Titebond Extend glue, found a small piece of cardboard to use as a spreader, and got started. I decided to start with the back section. If I totally messed up the boards, I could replace them easier than the nicest boards that I chose for the front section.
I wasn’t sure how much glue to pour out. Answer: not this much. What a sticky mess.
Chris Schwarz recommended a slow-setting glue like this (in fact, exactly what I bought) in his Workbenches book and that was definitely good advice. There’s a lot of spreading glue, tilting and lining up a board, spreading glue on the next one, and so forth, then fussing with all the clamps you can muster.
Franklin International (makers of Titebond glues) recommends clamping for four hours with this glue, so I just left it overnight.
2009.06.07
This morning I remembered that a couple years ago I bought a glue spreading set that included a roller. So I dug that out and filled the bottle with glue, and tried it on the second set of boards.
There was definitely less slop, but it went a lot slower. The roller didn’t spread the glue as evenly across the width as I had hoped, so I had to make multiple passes. Once again, using a slow-setting glue was key, as it was already starting to tack up by the time I got to the clamps.
I let that section sit in the clamps for about four hours, then moved it onto the wood rack with the first one.
For the third glue-up, I tried a hybrid approach of pouring the glue right out of the bottle, but using the roller to spread it around. It was messier than using the roller bottle but not as bad as my first attempt, and faster than squeezing glue out of the roller bottle.
One more section to go for the top.
2009.06.08
The front section of the top required some sawing before glue-up, to make a recess for the top guide of the sliding vise. I figured it would be a lot easier to cut the single board before gluing than mortising it out afterwards. I used the jigsaw and circular saw. Unfortunately I had a couple mishaps, but they’ll never show when the workbench is together.
After that was ready, I glued the four boards together.
Planer