Monday, December 24, 2012

What to Do with Slippery Glue

Sometimes you have a simple project where you just want to glue a couple of pieces of wood together.  You might not want to mess around with a bunch of fancy joinery, but you probably do want the alignment of the two pieces to be correct.  So you draw some lines on one piece to show where the other piece should go.
Then you smear some glue on both pieces and slap them together.  The glue is so slippery that you can't keep everything in position while you apply a clamp, and even if you could, the squeezed out glue has covered up your lines.  Bummer.
So what you need to do is start over, but this time before you start slinging the glue, clamp an alignment block right next to one of your layout lines, but on the opposite side of the line from where the glued-on piece is supposed to go.
Now you can glue and clamp the parts together and be confident that, as long as the part you're gluing is in contact with the alignment block, it will be in the right place.
Don't forget to remove the alignment block and clean up the excess glue before it hardens!

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