Hello Gary,
I have recently finished a table that is 42” x 76”. The top is made up with 6” boards of 6/4 Q-sawn w-oak. My problem is that the finish all down the glue joints has sort of popped so that when you run your hand across it you can feel a line, about like fishing line. This has never happened before but this is the biggest and thickest panel I’ve ever glued up. I’ll give you a brief rundown of my process so you can better analize. I purchased the material in early summer and let sit in the rafters of my shop for at least a month, jointed the edges so that when dry fit there were no gaps, used bisquits and glued up in sections, finished with aniline dye, gel stain and a wipe-on poly. This finishing process is where I strayed from my usual process, this table top is very heavy and my basset hound and I couldn’t flip it over by ourselves so I completely finished the top, got some help, flipped, and then finished the bottom. I have been chewing on this problem all weekend and if you can tell me what I’ve done wrong and give me direction on how to remedy this, I will forever be in debt.
thanks,
Jeremiah
Replies
Jeremiah,
Well it's tough to say. I'd like to ask you the color of your car like on Car Talk so I can stall for awhile while I think up an answer.
Let me get some stuff straight. The wood was kiln dried? Then sat up in your rafters to acclimate? If it was air dried then I'd point to moisture content as the problem. But if it was KD then I have to go elsewhere.
The only places you feel any movement is right at the glue lines, correct? I'm going back to moisture content. It's the only thing that makes any sense to me. I think stuff moved on you after gluing. Now if you used a PVA glue like Titebond it's easy for the stuff to stretch or creep as it's called. If you had any moisture imbalance, like improper drying, or, OR!, finishing one side more than another over a long period of time, say a week or more, perhaps you also had some moisture imbalance issues which showed up in glue lines that moved. Finally, if you glued any quartersawn edges with flat sawn edges then they would each expand and contract at different rates causing slight glue line shifts.
I don't think your finish would cause any reaction in the glue, although I s'pose it's possible that a glue not fully cured like a plastic resin or epoxy might go wacky on you. What kind of glue did you use? How long before scraping and sanding the top? And what color is your car again? Gary
Gary,
The wood was kiln dried and I used Titebond glue. I'm sure that I put a couple more coats of finish on the top. The finishing process might have taken a week, but not any longer. Although I had this same problem with the trestle style legs, which are 3' wide panels glued up using the same size boards as the top, and I put the same amount of finish on both sides of these, alternating sides as I went( do one side, flip, do the other...). The boards used in this table are all Q-sawn. I scraped and sanded the top of the table the day after the final glue-up, and my truck is black fading to rust.
Thanks for helping me try to figure this one out, I really appreciate it,
Jeremy
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