On wiping versus chipping
One of the most annoying things about doing a glueup (or just about anything else for that matter) is cleaning up after yourself. Once those clamps have been tightened, you’ll have glue squeezing out all over the place, and unless you have an eye that’s accurate to the milliliter, dripping everywhere. So how do you clean up the gluey mess? There are two approaches I’ve used. Note that this assumes a water soluble glue, like any of the Titebond series (I/II/III)
1) Chip
For a long time, this was my preferred method. It’s pretty straightforward: wait until the glue hardens completely, grab a sharp chisel, and scrape off the glue. The catch, as always, is in the fundamental zen nature of the glue itself: it’s supposed to stick to things. When you pry it off, it has a tendancy to drag small chunks and splinters of your newly completed furniture along with it, kicking and screaming. You wind up doing some pretty heavy sanding to make up for it. Sharp chisels help, but it’s definitely not optimal.
2) Wipe
I tried this several times with lousy results. Basically, the idea here is that until it sets up, glue is water soluble. You wipe it with water and it dissolves. Easy enough in theory. In practice, though, it doesn’t come off that easily. Slightly-hardened edges of the glue drips stay behind. Worse, you leave a thin haze of dilute glue everywhere, which soaks into the wood. You don’t discover this until you stain the wood and find giant glue-blotches all over everything. Believe me when I say this sucks the big julep.
Well, recently a friend of mine who espouses this approach showed me the light. It’s simple and I should have figured it out myself. You see, solubility of most things goes UP with the temperature. That means more stuff dissolves in hot water than cold and it dissolves faster, which is why you make iced tea with boiling hot water and then chill it after it’s steeped. Basically, the secret to success with the wipe method is to keep a cheapo electric kettle on hand and use actual boiling water to do the trick. It cools fast, so you have to re-dip every minute or so. Also, this approach has a tendency to result in first and second degree burns if you’re not careful, so use hand protection. But if you apply the stuff liberally with a wet towel, good ol’ H2O is miraculous for this purpose. Just don’t try this with softwoods–they’ll absorb too much water and cause problems later. And be sure to get to the glue drips fast; after about 15 minutes it’s started to harden enough that it won’t clean up as well.
But go get yourself a tea kettle (and a non-water-soluble heatproof glove). It works better than the chipper approach and faster too. You’ll thank me for it.
UPDATE: a fourth method is here.
(“Sucks the big julep” probably gets an award for most obscure reference in this blog to date)
(The solubility of gas in water is *inversely* proportional to temperature (at temperatures around 40-80 degrees F), but that’s an exception to the rule.)
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