gluing and temperature

[Keye]

It is about 55 degrees in the shop right now. The heat is now on and I can hit about 65 degrees.

I am going to glue up mortise and tenon joints today for a dresser. A lot of gluing. I remembered to bring in the glue last night but I am worried about the wood. I know the air will be 65 degrees but I am sure the wood will not be. My plans were to dampen the tenons a little to give me a little more time.

Am I taking a chance or should I be OK with this?

 

[toolferone]

I feel pretty sure you will be fine. I have glued up colder then that before with no problem.

 

[DavidF]

This is spookley topical, I have just had two joint failures using Elmers yellow glue. Normally I use TB II and have NEVER had a failure. Both times the joints glued up fine with good squeeze out, but the first one failed when I dropped the piece some days later and the second one after running over the jointer and through the planer. I too had brought the glue in to the house previously, but the wood wasn't. I guess it was about 60 in the shop at the time, but had been down in the 40's. The other thing that crossed my mind is that I had kept the brush in water from the last glue up and it may have been slightly wet when I applied the glue, but I wouldn't have thought that would do it:dontknow: I may have got used to taking liberties with TBII and am used to leaving on the clamps for a couple of hours and pretty much doing as I please with it. afterwards. On the Elmers bottle it does say to clamp for an hour and then do nothing with it for 24, maybe I just rushed it. I had also not applied huge clamp pressure on them because of buckling the panel, but again, never had the problem before. There was glue on both surfaces after the break, so it was actually the glue line that failed.

 

[McRabbet]

Any chance that the bottle was an old one? Or that it had frozen at some time? In any case, time to warm up and go back to good [STRIKE]old[/STRIKE] new TBII! :3some:

 

[DavidF]

Any chance that the bottle was an old one? Or that it had frozen at some time? In any case, time to warm up and go back to good [strike]old[/strike] new TBII! :3some:

The bottle was "quite" old, but not excessively, but I think I'll be going back to TBII or the good Loctite brand that Walmart sells.

 

[Glennbear]

Any chance that the bottle was an old one? Or that it had frozen at some time? In any case, time to warm up and go back to good [strike]old[/strike] new TBII! :3some:

:thumbs_up Excellent thought, my ancient bottle of Elmer's which overwintered last year in an unheated storage unit in frigid NJ will be headed for the trash before I end up with failures on my next project.:BangHead:

 

[DavidF]

I think this bottle has been around since last April, so maybe I'll bite the bullet and dump it.

 

[BumoutBob]

Would it be better to keep the wood and the glue at the same temperature when gluing? (As long as the glue and wood are above 50 deg----warmer is better of course) I have heard that Titebond II is good for a year. When I bought the last bottle I looked for the date stamp and found it was several months old when I bought it. Might be good to mark the date on the bottle when you buy it---next year you'll know when it's out of date.
Not all date codes are dd/mm/yy.