Greenie512

Glues

Mainly I tend to use the standard yellow PVA glue for all my work - that’s it.

Well, a while back I could see gluing up a complete cabinet was going to be a race against the clock as 5 minutes is about all the “open time” you have with PVA. So I tried polyurethane glue which has a 20 minute open time. That proved good and I liked the way it foamed out of the joint, giving me a very clear indicator that there was enough glue there.

How strong is your glue?

Fine Woodworking - August 2007 tested six different types of glue including the two above. They did some serious destruction tests on glued joints and surprisingly PVA came out as the overall best glue. But the big shock was polyurethane glue joints came out the weakest.

Now I’m not going to drive a car over my cabinets to test this and I’d guess my poly joints were just as good in the application I was using this glue as PVA. However I’ll stick with PVA where ever possible and only use poly if I need that long open time for construction.