Wood glue showdown

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mark james

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Awesome video/link Ken. Nice to see some actual science beyond opinions. Opinions are great, but rarely cover a wider breadth of possibilities. Thanks for sharing this.
 

monophoto

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Saratoga Springs, NY
Very interesting.

My conclusions are:
1. For ordinary gluing applications, all of the PVA glues performed well, with the 'craft glues' slightly less robust that those marketed as wood glues.
2. Ordinary wood glues don't have much water resistance, but the glues marketed as water resistant were pretty good.
3. FlexBond doesn't measure up as well as the PVA glues, but that's not a surprise - its a specialty product and not something that wood workers would choose for day-to-day application.
4. All of the joints involved end-grain. Conventional wisdom is that end-grain joints aren't a strong as face grain joints. I would like to see this series of tests repeated with face-grain joints.
 

KenB259

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I was a little surprised about the amount of variance between the same glue. I would like to see the same tests using different types of glue too.
 

Bryguy

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Jun 9, 2013
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New Hampshire
The real question is, given the fact that our wood is glued wood to wood and wood to tube which is more important, shear or tensile strength? I use Titebond III for wood segmenting, Epoxy for wood to other materials segmenting and Gorilla glue for tubes.
 

monophoto

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I was a little surprised about the amount of variance between the same glue. I would like to see the same tests using different types of glue too.
I suspect the variance between test samples but with the same glue has to do with the characteristics of the glue, with the amount of glue used, and with the elapsed time between when the glue was applied and when the joints were clamped. These were all end-grain joints where glue rapidly soaks into the fibers of the wood - the more elapsed time, the more glue is drawn into the fibers leaving less glue at the joint surface.

This was a very good series of tests, but it would be helpful to include more than three samples to prevent one bad (or good) sample from biasing the results. I suspect that the manufacturers do thousands of samples as part of product development and to support their marketing claims.

I think Mattias Wandel did a YouTube video in which he compared different kinds of glue.
 
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