Titebond liquid hide glue

[Brian Evans]

Stewmac just sent an ad that included Titebond liquid hide glue. I haven't seen this or heard much about it - only some other liquid hide glues. Any thoughts on it?

Brian

[David King]

Several old threads on this subject if you want to look through them. Perhaps the formulation has changed? My recollection is Don't! Urea is added to make the glue liquid at room temperature and that causes it to get a little tacky/melty in high humidity.

[Jim McConkey]

I used some many years ago before I read all the discussions and warnings, and I have had no problems with the joints to this day. I still prefer and use hot hide glue almost exclusively these days, but my experience is the worries over the bottled version are likely overblown.

[Barry Daniels]

On my first guitar the fingerboard fell off the neck after clamping for 24 hours and the glue was still wet. I have been warning people to stay away from it every since.

[Alan Carruth]

I think that a lot of the problems folks, including myself, have had with liquid hide glues have to do with shelf life. The additives (and I gather there are several different ones) can tend sometimes to work too well as the stuff ages, so that it goes from hardening properly to becoming tacky in damp weather to just not working at all. There are two issues here. One is knowing how long the stuff has been on the shelf. The manufacturers date stamp them, presumably using a decipherable code, so you can check that. The other one, which Is harder to get a handle on, is what conditions the glue has been subjected to on it's way to the store. Shippers may not abide by the 'cool, dark, and dry' cautions, and it's possible that a short session of over heating early on could cause a batch to go 'off' pretty quickly. This is also a problem with epoxies, of course.

Another issue is that, given the time and effort we put into these things, even one failure can be catastrophic. This is especially true when it's in a structural part that is hard to get to. If a HHG joint on a top brace, say, fails for some reason it's a drag, but you can usually work some more glue in and make it right; the old stuff will amalgamate. With liquid hide glue that's gone over to the dark side you really should remove it all, since the chemistry could poison any hide glue that was put in to repair the problem, and there's no sense in putting something like Titebond on a surface that's coated with non-structural goo. Having had one or two failures early on, and heard of plenty more with other liquid hide glues, I'm just not willing to take the risk. Perhaps I've learned the wrong lesson, like Mark Twain's cat that never jumped on any stove after he jumped on a hot one.

[Dave Higham]

A ‘friend’ asked me to repair this mostrosity for him (an oud, it fell off the wall). I didn’t want to but he insisted, even though I told him it certainly wouldn’t look like new again. In fact, even when new, the workmanship is pretty rough including wood filler where the inlays didn’t fit. The ribs (?) are about .080” thick, butt jointed and the whole of the inside seems to have been painted with a mixture of glue and sawdust to help hold it all together. There are cracks all over the place and, as I don’t use hot hide glue, I thought I’d try to glue one crack at a time using Titebond liquid hide glue so I ordered some on Ebay and it came from Germany (I’m in France). I even received two bottles when I’d only ordered one as Franklin had sold it as a 2-bottle pack. The bottles have a date printed on the back and although it’s not very clear, it looks to me like 2015! So I don’t think I’ll be using it.

I’m now thinking about using fish glue which I’ve used for some time. Any opinions?

If you click on the photos you’ll get a much bigger image.

[Clay Schaeffer]

Fish glue sounds reasonable.
I would glue the body cracks first, then glue some small cross braces (as is done for the rose) across the inlay openings to keep them from falling into the bowl.Most of the ouds I've seen are kind of crude, and have very thin tops.