Laminating Wood - Discussion and Plans

Hi Everyone,

Well, everything in the wood shop is up and running again except the bandsaw but that will be fixed tomorrow. In the meantime I've been working on preparing a number of blocks of various sizes to turn on the lathe and make darning eggs, rolling pins, etc.

One of the things I've been wanting to do is make large enough blocks to make bowls and tea boxes and other larger things with. So I went down to the work shop and cut up several hickory and one walnut board and got these pieces ready to be laminated together:

Lamination, or making a laminate, involves gluing two or more layers of material together to create one solid object. Lamination is widely used in manufacturing in areas such as woodworking, glass making, and even in areas like dentistry. If you've ever seen the edge of a piece of plywood, you'll see how the layers are glued together to make one large sheet.

We're going to do the same thing today with our pieces of hickory and walnut. These pieces are 3 1/4 inches wide x 12 inches long. I've cleaned all the surfaces off and dry assembled them into a pattern that I like and now for the gooey part--time to apply the glue. I used Titebond for this because it's approved for food bearing surfaces and it's also for wood working. So here we go:

I'm going to apply glue to the wide surface and assemble the block like a big sandwich:

Next comes the hard part. We have to glue this whole thing together with clamps so it will dry up into one solid block with very thin glue lines. For this we need a special type of clamp called a pipe clamp:

These are heavy and they won't bend when I apply them to the block and clamp them down.


Lastly, I'm going to apply 4 clamps, one to each end and one each on the top and bottom of the block like this:

I can just hear the poor block yelling, "Ouch!! Let me out of here!!"

Now the whole thing is going to dry and since it's still too cold out side for glue to dry, it's drying on my dining room table. I'll leave this over night and come back and check it out tomorrow. When this is dry I'm going cut out a large round turning blank out of this block and mount that on the lathe and see what happens.

If this works, I'm going to be cutting and laminating up a storm and I'll make a large number of blocks for bowl, platters, and tea boxes.

Now I'm going to go down to the wood shop and clean up and sharpen some of my turning chisels. See  you tomorrow.

VW