Hot hide glue and top braces.....

Today I was able to get the top braces all glued up and in the go-bar deck. I decided to go ahead and give hot hide glue a shot. A couple of days ago I dissolved some HHG pellets in distilled water and heated it to get the glue. It has been in the fridge since then as the glue has a fairly long shelf life as long as it is refrigerated. I heated the glue in a water bath until the glue was watery thin and approx. 145 degrees. I did some tests with it when I made it so I had a feel for how it works as well as how hard it sticks and how long of open time I had to work with. Basically with my shop sitting around 85 degrees, I had roughly a minute of open time until the glue would skin over. HHG only works until it skins over. Once that skin forms, it is too late to clamp and it needs to be re-done. The really neat thing about it is that it gains a fairly strong tack at that 1 minute point. That can really come in handy for different gluing tasks. Anyways, I took my time, and went one brace at a time. It went well. I only had one finger brace that I needed to re-do as it slid out of place while I was trying to get the go-bar set, and the glue had already started to set. That is the second nice thing about this glue. It cleans up really easily. All I needed to do was get a paper towel damp with warm water and the glue literally washes right off.

I am pleased with the results. It is a little bit of a messy glue-up as I was more concerned with getting the go-bars set in time than trying to clean the squeeze out, but again the cleanup should be easy. I am anxious to get it out of the deck and cleaned up so I can start tuning the top. Once I had that all done, I raduised the back braces and cut the notches in the back X brace. I also sanded down the kerfed linings in the radius dishes. Tomorrow I plan on getting the back center brace glued up, and the back braces shaped. Also I want to start the final shaping of the top braces.

First thing I did was to erase and sand off most of the lines for the brace pattern. I learned that these pencil lines are very difficult to remove after the braces are on. I left only the end points of each line for reference.

This is my super duper high tech hot hide glue melting rig. One thing I forgot to mention, this stuff stinks!

Here it is all glued up. It is not as neat and clean as some of my other glue-ups, but that was expected for my first try using HHG.

Here is the back and back braces. I still need to shape them but they are radiused. You will notice that I am using a X brace pattern for the back. I am hoping that it will help the back hold it's full radius better than the standard ladder brace with humidity swings.