A way to glue two wood surfaces together

[Dan C]

A few days ago I posted a thread called "Need some help finding an article" in this section. I had seen an interesting article some years ago for carving a solar green man face and couldn't remember where it was. "edge" came up with the source for me. It's on page 36 of Chris Pye's book "Elements of Woodcarving". I'm going to give it a try.

Chris used a piece of 2" thick English Elm and cut a circle about 16" in diameter.

I have a nice piece of Honduras mahogany that is 15" wide and 1 1/2" thick. I had a choice of going with the 1 1/2" thick piece or gluing two pieces together so I would have a 3" thick piece. I decided to go with the thicker piece. My problem was that my planer is only 12" wide, so I couldn't use it to plane down the surfaces before gluing. I sanded the two surfaces down smooth, but they still rocked a little when I placed them together.

My solution (I'll see if it works!) to get a tight joint was to use the device in the picture, and I thought that others might find the idea useful. I wanted to press the two 15" squares together with as much pressure as possible to eliminate any spaces between the surfaces.

I made the frame you see and then screwed down the floor jack to compress the two surfaces together. Then I placed U-clamps around the outside edge and tightened them very tightly using a pipe over the clamp rod to get extra leverage.

Hopefully, I'll come up with a nice tight glue joint that will be pretty invisible as I carve. This is all new to me, so I'm just hoping for the best! I thought I'd post the picture on the chance that someone might find it useful.

[Dan C]

I'm not sure why the picture is turned on it's side. It's correct when I view it on my computer.

[brent]

If the 2 pcs. aren't perfectly flat, it will more than likely separate at some point due to the stress created. If you squeeze to hard, you might squeeze out a good bit of the glue. If you don't press enough, you will end up with pockets of dried glue......this will not be to good on the chisel/gouge edge either. Look/ask around where you live, someone will have a planer or maybe even a wide belt sander capable of flattening the two surfaces....a furniture plant,community college etc.
Good luck.

[Dan C]

Thanks Brent. I guess time will tell in this case. I think I actually do know someone who could help with a wider planer and will probably give him a call for some future project. I think the process I used brought the two surfaces together without any glue pockets. Time will tell. I certainly can't speak here with the voice of experience. Maybe after this project, I'll have a better feeling for how well this works.

With respect to stress, I suspect that after I carve away a lot of wood to create the carving, a lot of the stresses will be relieved.

This floor jack process isn't something I can claim credit for. It was brought up by a carver at a carving show I attended a couple of years back. I've had it in the back of my mind and thought I'd give it a try. He used it to squeeze some blocks of wood together for a large bust carving. He said he couldn't even see the seam. The point he made was that the pressure forces the glue down into the wood fibers creating an even stronger bond. Anyway, I'm hoping for the best.

[mdallensr]

I carved my version of the solar green man in Pye's book in Honduran Mahogany. I down-sized it slightly too. You don't need nearly that much thickness (3"); 2" would probably work for 15" dia. I made mine a little over 12" in diameter and used wood 1 1/4" thick. Mike

[brent]

mdallensr......that's a really nice Green Man!!

[Dan C]

mdallensr - very nice carving! My problem was that I had a 1 1/2 inch thick piece of wood, so I had to either go with a carving 1 1/2" thick or else glue two pieces together and have a 3" thick carving. I decided to go with the 3" thick blank. One thing you did different from Chris was to leave out the background circle of wood behind the carved figure that sort of frames his carving. That gave you some extra depth for the carving itself. What you did works just fine, but I think I want that circle of wood behind mine and the extra thickness will allow me to do a carving in deeper relief. Thanks for posting your picture!

[Donsexton]

Looks like it would work well, back in the day we called that a clamping jig.

[Dan C]

Donsexton - Yeah, that's a good general name for it. I'm pretty happy with the gluing result so far. I've got the circle cut out. Now I just have to get busy and carve! Looking forward to the project. It's probably going to be pretty different from Chris' carving. I tend to try and make things pretty realistic and his is pretty stylized. I'm going to try for something in-between. With all the extra thickness, mine will be pretty deep relief.