Gluing Up Furniture Legs

Some projects call for legs larger than what we can get from standard dimensional stock and that means gluing parts together. So what's going on here, I've got a three ply assembly going so that I can get a bigger leg out of what I'm working with here. Problem with this is that I want to have this quarter sawn four sides. So what happens is that when I take my quarter sawn material and I glue it together face to face I end up with quarter sawn here, plain sawn here. Additionally, there's some striping going on here because of variation in color in the pieces. Color match might get away from that, but it's hard to make these seams completely go away. Unless we do this. So here's the trick to getting quarter sawn four sides. And just in general, if we have to glue a leg up making it look a lot better. And that is to make a really thin piece, veneer-like, that's going to lay over these other two sides. Once we've got that done and trimmed it's going to look really, really cool. So step is, glue this in place. For glue application standard yellow glue is going to be just fine. What we do need to do is get a nice uniform coating of glue across these faces. So here's a trick for ya. We are not going to spare the rod. We're going to use threaded rod 16 threads per inch and it works like a mastic knife to spread the glue. Filling in my naked spots. It's a great way to pick the glue up off the surface, get the excess off. Now when my skin goes on this side I'm going to do the other face as well. The problem is going to be keeping this registered. The skin is just barely bigger than the leg. That's going to make the trim step easier. So what I'm going to do in the waste wood on each end is hit that with a micro pin. Keeping the skin centered. Skin centered. I'm not asking the pin to draw that down into the bed of glue. I'm just asking it to hold it in place while I work over here. When you're done on this project with that threaded rod just wash it off. The glue will come right out of those threads and you can use it again later. The skin is centered. Pin in the waste wood. Alright, I'm going to get clamps on this. Give the glue a chance to dry. And once that's dry, we'll come back, trim it up and you'll have a chance to see the transformation from before and after. And what a great addition it is to have those two extra skins on there and give us that quarter sawn four side leg that we're after. Once the glue was dry I used a flush trim router bit and I trimmed those quarter sawn skins back so they're flush with the leg. And I'm putting a coat of oil on here just so you can see the net effect of this. Wipe off that face. Wipe off that face. Which face did I put the skins on? This is so cool because we get that quarter sawn four side look by just adding that little bit of shop made veneer. Great technique for making really nice looking legs. The other benefit we get out of this is remember we've got a three ply leg going here. That center ply could be anything. So it's a way to save some money too when you put the legs together because we could use a less desirable piece for that center ply. Next time you're gluing up legs for a table, consider doing this technique. Remember the threaded rod that we use to spread the glue and how well that worked for our glue application. It's a great way to get your legs looking wonderful. All four sides.