Gluing Up Panels

I want to talk about what it takes to get a panel glued up and put together. And here's the reason why. This kind of drives me nuts, in all honesty. I see a lot of misinformation out there. I get a lot of questions from people about how they should do this. And they're proposing methods for this that I think are just not necessary. So, let's have a look at stuff like how you compose the panel? How much glue do you use? Do you need biscuits in the joints? Just the general mechanics of making this work and work well. So first thing, I've got boards here that are ready to go. Ready to go means I've already joined to the edges. Now I know that they're good because when I slide edges together and I hold them together with hand pressure, like this seam right here, it should be completely gap free. If there are gaps in here now, don't trick yourself into thinking that if I put enough glue and clamp pressure on this, I can squeeze it closed. You don't want to do that. You should be able to close it with hand pressure and it's gonna be fine. If it's gappy now, you gotta go back to the jointer or hand plane or whatever you used, and rework that joint. You gotta get it until they close by themselves. Next thing, I've got three boards here. What am I after? Well, you're always gonna glue up a slab that's larger than what you need. Don't try to hit your final dimension with the glue up. Glue it up oversize, cut it to final size when you're done. It's a good idea on a real big glue up, like if I'm doing something like a big table, I'm gonna have more boards ready than what I really need to use for this. And the reason for that is that my next step is to start manipulating these and looking for what kind of match do I want to make this look as seamless as possible? And it's possible these three boards won't give me that match. So I might need a fourth or fifth to swap in here so I can get the look I want. Look I want, here's what I'm after. Look at the grain on this edge. It runs pretty straight. And look at the grain on this edge and how wild that is. If I take those two and put them together, guess what? There's a seam right there where I glued those boards together. If I take these two and I put them together, look at how nice a match that grain is for that grain. So when I do that, the grain is naturally flowing from this board to this board. So I'm matching straight grain to straight grain, wild grain to wild grain, in order to make this look like it isn't three boards that were glued together, to try to get it to look where it's one big board. The other thing is color match. This is red oak. Color match with these boards is naturally pretty good. I'm happy with that seam. Let's look at this one where the grain is a little wilder. That's not bad. Look at how nicely these come together here. Or should I do this? That's, I like that a little better maybe. Or should I do this? Or should I do this? So you're just gonna keep manipulating the boards until you get what you want. And I think of those, I think I like this one the best. Now, this has only three boards so it's easy to figure out, remember what's going on here. On a more extensive glue up with more pieces, make sure you mark them. Marking is easy. That seam gets a one. That seam gets a two, three, four, all the way down. So once I start handling these boards, I know I'm gonna put them back together the way that I want them to go. Next thing is, do I need biscuits in here? Absolutely not. If we have good joints, which we do, when we get glue in here and we close this, that joint is gonna be stronger than the surrounding wood. And the reason for putting biscuits or dominoes or something in here would be, if you want to use those to help keep the top faces registered, to help keep them even, that's the only reason to add them. But from a strength perspective, you absolutely do not need to put biscuits or dominoes or anything in here. Keeping them aligned. That's gonna buy us some, or save you maybe, some sanding or planing time later, because the better they're aligned at glue up, the easier it's gonna be to get this flat. If you do use biscuits or dominoes, watch where you locate them out toward the end of the board because what we don't want is to cut this to length and suddenly we're exposing one of those fastening devices, one of those loose tenons. All right, how much glue? Let's look at an edge. You only need to glue one edge, of the two, of the pair. What we're looking for is an opaque coating of glue. So think of it like painting a wall. When you're painting a wall, you want to cover the wall, you want to cover the previous color. See right here, how I can't see the wood grain through that glue anymore. That's what I want. I'm actually a little heavy down here. So I'm gonna take some of that and go there. And if you're heavy on this one, which I am a little, I'm just gonna put it on my paper. Bloop. Bloop For this size glue up, two clamps are gonna work great. Plenty of pressure. Starting on one clamp, I'm gonna feel these boards for level, just check the faces. Work my way down to the next one. And we're done. Now, squeeze out. Here's my idea with this squeeze out. I'm gonna leave that sit for 15 or 20 minutes. In 15 or 20 minutes it's gonna get rubbery and I'm gonna be able to slice it right off the surface with a chisel or a putty knife. If you go too soon, it's gonna be too liquidy, and instead of slicing it off, you're gonna smear it. If you go too late, then it's gonna get too hard. So you gotta watch it pretty closely. The time is gonna change based on conditions in your shop, how dry it is. Yellow glue dries by evaporation. So if it's real hot, real dry, 20 minutes might be too long. Another thing, maybe I need this bench for something else while this glue is drying. Don't do this with this panel. Do this with this panel. In this configuration, that squeeze out, you can already see it doing it, is gonna run down the seam. And that makes it easy to deal with. If I turn it the other way, the squeeze out starts running across the face and I have way more squeeze out to deal with. So there are some good tips for gluing up panels. Pay attention to that recipe and it's gonna help you get good panels every time you do an edge to edge.