Author: fitz

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

Hey everybody, it’s that time of year again – it’s the Anarchist’s Gift Guide. We’ve been doing this for more than a decade now, people seem to like it, so I guess we’ll keep it up. Why? Unlike some other gift guides, ours isn’t sponsored. (In fact, if somebody asked us to write about their tool for the gift guide, our standard retort would be: “Why don’t you poop up your own butt?”) This is stuff we use and love. We have 11 offerings this year, and will publish one a day until we’re done. – Chris & Fitz

Dubuque Clamps

These lightweight aluminum, Iowa-made bar clamps are the cat’s pajamas for a lot of my work. No, they can’t exert the bone-crushing pressure of our handful of old iron Hargraves, and the clamping pad isn’t as deep as the K-bodies. But if my joints are well fit, I don’t need a lot of pressure. And because I’m almost always clamping dovetails, I’m right up at the edges, and I don’t need a deep throat.

I like that I can easily pick up my projects when they’re in clamps to stack them to dry, thereby clearing off some of my bench. These 24″-long ones weigh less than half as much as the Bessey K-body of the same length (2 lbs. vs. 5 lbs. 6 ou.). And they’re a lot easier for students to use. The ratcheting pad on one end is easy to slide into place, then it’s simply a matter of turning the screw on the other end to tighten things down. No pushing a handle toward a bar to get it to catch, as with the K-bodies.

I also like the price of these, compared to the K-bodies. The 24″ clamps ones start at around $40; the longest (48″) are only a few dollars more. They’re available from multiple sellers. – Fitz