Back when I was making the dovetailed drawers for my vanity, I did something dumb and one drawer got glued in place crocked. I thought I was going to have to bandsaw the drawer off and go through a lot of scraping (all the while creating new enhanced vocabulary), but a simple heat gun trick took it apart despite the fact that the whole thing was glued up for 2 days.
Here's a short video showing it in action; hopefully you'll file it away in your head and never have to use it.
Naturally, I like woodworking as a hobby, but an ice hockey tournament will easily get me out of the shop :)
Posts
Paul:
Very creative! Using a heat gun for attaching the blade for your hockey stick to fix your drawer.
Nice.
Tim
Nice fix Paul, heat-guns come in very handy don't they, I use one to make pre-raising the grain quicker.(I still haven't sent your parcel by the way)
Thanks, Tim. Unfortunately, I can only replace the blade of the stick with the heat gun; I've never figured a way to preload it with goals :)
Oh, good idea, Mark... here in Arizona raising the grain goes pretty quickly :) but I could see it being useful if you want to get to finishing immediately after applying water.
No worries about the parcel!
GREAT! tip, Paul! I wish you would have posted this last week. It would have saved me a cut and redone domino.
I thought you were a goalie?
Jim
Paul
Are you sure that the ultimate joint strength won't be altered? Sometimes you need to compromise and a dovetail joint almost doesn't need glue. I'm not sure that I would do that on some less intrinsically strong joint.
That being said I done a lot worse than that!! I am surprised that modern glues would react like that. I don't think that I would have even thought of heating up the joint. As in most circumstances desperate men do desperate things which can lead to a good idea.
Hide glue is designed to release with heat. If i lived in Arizona I would watch what I stored in my my car while I shopped in woodcraft, certainly not my recently glued up panels!!
John
Bummer, Jim, as I've had this video ready to release for almost a month :) d'oh! I knew I needed filler for this week when my day job went nuts and when filming the finishing video... varnish coats alone will take days!
John, I don't know definitively if the joint strength will be compromised. As you point out, the dovetail joint doesn't need much glue at all. I did clean up the joint before regluing it so the joint was effectively 'sized' instead of raw. It seemed fine the next day.
When I applied the drawer fronts (done weeks ago but I'm still editing the video), I used hide glue because of its reversibility. Certainly, it doesn't let go without a fight, but the fight is less than with PVA.
I should have mentioned in the video that I intended to use hide glue for the front Mahogany-to-Maple joint. It looks so much like Mahogany when dried that it can make up for -ahem- messy shoulders one might end up with if rushing to get out of a hot garage. For the back Maple-to-Maple, I wanted PVA since it is closer to Maple color (Elmer's would have been better still). I think of these things, then forget when I do them :)
BTW, Epoxy softens at 250ºF, but so does the lignan in the wood!
Very Creative, I cringed when you said you spilled tea all over your Veritas Planes.
Great tip! I have a couple from my construction days. Handy little buggers.
Ah, Vic, you're back! :-P Thought you went down the photography squirrel-hole, which wasn't a bad thing... I want to frame nearly all your HDR shots.
Oh, I just realized that Jim thought I was nuts enough to be a goalie... heck no! Not getting in front of 90 mph shots (okay, our league, 50ish) although when I played defense, I stopped more than a few slap-shots with my ankle. ouch. I think that's why one looks funny.