Happy Thanksgiving – and we don’t recommend you eat the hide glue cake (though you can).
Hide Glue Cake – Soaked and Ready to Use
Animal glues are the best adhesive for our work. They are reversible and can be configured to set up quickly or slowly, depending on what you need.
Whenever we talk to students about the wonders of animal collagen, some of them resist. They don’t like soaking the dry hide glue pearls overnight. Or melting the glue. Or they don’t like taking care of the glue to protect it from bacteria. Or they’re afraid of the smell (it really doesn’t smell much unless you mistreat it – just like food).
So we are always trying to find ways to remove the weird mental barriers that people have to animal glue.
This giant cake of hide glue from Talas is one of those ways. It has been soaked in water already. So all you need to do is cut some off the cake and heat it up to use it. We keep some metal salad dressing containers handy for this process. We cut off a chunk, put it in the salad dressing container and then drop the sealed container into the glue pot.
We then use what we need and put the rest in the fridge.
We love having hide glue always at hand and *almost* ready to go. Hot hide glue sets up super-fast, which is its superpower. You can put together edge joints without clamps (called a rub joint). Or hold pieces of casework together with the glue as you drive in the fasteners (in many ways it’s a third hand at the bench).
And don’t worry about using up the glue before it expires. Keep it wrapped up in the fridge and will last indefinitely – years and years. – CS