Tips for a Panel Glue Up

George Vondriska

Duration: 8 mins

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Transcript

Description

If you need wide, solid wood panels for your next project, you’re going to have to glue them up. Doing a good panel glue up isn’t hard, but there are specific steps you need to follow, and things you need to take care of, to make sure the panel glue up turns out well. A well composed panel can easily end up looking like one large piece of wood, with no seams at all.

What are we looking for?

There are a number of things to keep in mind as you work on gluing boards up to make a large panel. They include color match, grain pattern match, quality of the joints, amount of glue used, and more. You’ll learn about all of these things in this video.

Questions we’ll answer for you

There are some very common questions about panel glue up that we’ll take care of for you in this video. Should you use biscuits or dominoes or dowels in the joint? How do you know the joints are sound? How much glue should be used? How large should the glue up be compared to the final panel required for the project? What’s the best way to handle squeeze out? You’ll get answers to all of these questions.

Wanna know more?

This is a pretty comprehensive video, but WoodWorkers Guild of America has a great depth of information ready to help you out. If you want to go even more in depth, we’ve got it for you, and you can learn more on gluing up panels.

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12 Responses to “Tips for a Panel Glue Up”

Elias Wipf November 30th, 2020

‬ What are your clamps called in this panel glue up video? Where could we purchase some?
Jay November 30th, 2020

Excellent video! I've been using a router glue joint bit for joining 3/4" boards, thinking that it increases the surface area for gluing and thus results in a stronger bond. But when clamping the boards together, there's a tendency for the board joints to not be totally straight and level with bowing at the joints as well as the difficulty in surface alignment. From your video, all that should be totally unnecessary and if all that I need are straight edges and the same board thicknesses, that should make these glue-ups a lot easier, especially with the post-joining sanding/planing. Thank you.
Tad November 30th, 2020

I went through high school about 50 years ago. After an extended hiatus I’m getting back into wood working. My shop teacher taught us to put a single layer of newspaper in the glue joints. He claimed it made them stronger and reduced slipping and squeeze out. We used the original tight bond glue. I have not seen this technique used in recent web based instruction. Have you heard of this? What’s changed? Perhaps it was only used on face to face glue ups? Thanks.
Cheryl November 30th, 2020

What are those clamps called?
Del November 30th, 2020

Wished you would have told us about the squeeze out on the under side of those 3 boards?
BOB MORGAN November 29th, 2020

Great advice. I learned to do the "rubbery" glue when I taught beginner classes.
TIMOTHY April 28th, 2019

George, I’ve always thought using cauls was best practice on a flat panel glue-up, but haven’t seen you use them. Do you use only when necessary to tame a misalignment, or never at all?
Danny Barnes April 28th, 2019

I have been told to alternate "cup" of the grain of the boards. Is that not necessary?
mrobins1057 December 9th, 2017

I've been doing everything outlined here but your tips on the amount of glue was very helpful. If anything I tended to put too little glue on to minimize squeeze out, but having a visual reference will make it easier to judge how much is applied. Thanks. By the way George, you must be working out and/or dieting as you're looking pretty buff these days.
Mike November 20th, 2017

While I agree with, and use, your approach, I have also found that pocket screws work very well and I have used them without glue to join panels. Have you used this approach and, if so, what’s your opinion?

I wanna 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 jointed 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 wanna do that. You should be able to close it with hand pressure and it's gonna be fine. If it's gappy now, you've 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's 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 glue those boards together. If I take these two and I put 'em 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 a 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 we'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 easier to figure out, remember what's going on here on a more extensive glue up with more pieces. Make sure you mark 'em. 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 wanna 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 you some or save you maybe some sanding or planning 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 'cause 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 tenants. All right, how much glue? Let's look at an edge. You only need to glue one edge. And 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 the wall, you wanna cover the wall. You wanna 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, 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. It's plenty of pressure. Starting on one clamp, I'm gonna feel these boards for level to check the faces. Work my way down to the next one. And we're done. Now, squeeze out. Here's my deal with the 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.

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