Gluing Up Panels

By Joseph Fusco

Lets face it. . . Every so often you need to glue up panels. This is just one aspect of being a woodworker. In the short work that follows I hope to make it a bit easier on those who need to do it.

So lets get right to it. After you have dimensioned your lumber to its finished thickness (this will depend if you can glue your panels up and then run them through a thickness planer of large flat surface sander) you can now joint the edges and prepare to glue up the panel. If you are unfamiliar with "jointing" either by the use of a jointer or by hand planing, you can start here.

This first images shows the boards after they have been jointed. What this does is make the edges perfectly straight and square to the "face" surface of the board.

Once you have jointed the edges you can install biscuits to help "align" the top edges of the boards. You don't need the biscuits for anything other then alignment.

Once you have cut the slots for the biscuits you lay your boards out across in the clamps you are going to use. I'm use Bessey's K bodies, but regular pipe clamps will do just as good a job.

Apply the glue to the edges and let a little fall into the biscuits slot. There's really no need to apply glue to the biscuit since their only for alignment.

Once you have put glue on all the edges place the board flat down on the clamps making sure the board is touching the clamps along its entire bottom.

Gently tighten the clamps just enough so the glue squeezes out. While the glue is still wet it's a good idea to clean as much of it off as possible.

Sometimes if there is a slight misalignment at the very end you can use a wooden clamp to bring the two piece in to alignments.

This image show the boards touching the clamp along its entire width. This will help ensure that the boards will remain as "flat" as possible.

This images show that the boards rest along all three clamps ensuring that the entire board will be as flat as possible.

Once all the boards are glued up let them stay under clamp pressure for at least 2 hours if you used yellow glue before removing them.

Once all the boards are removed from the clamps you can see that they have remained relatively flat.

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