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Anybody used Old Brown Glue? Its made with Hide Glue and urea. Has a longer open time and is supposed to be reversible. I have a large double bass back to glue and the idea of Hot Hide glue is not appealing.

https://oldbrownglue.com/index.php/faq-and-info

Mike

I've not used the Old Brown Glue but a friend of mine who builds violins and cellos uses fish glue very successfully. The long open time is nice.

Old Brown Glue is fine. Three things:

1. Watch the expiration date. It does matter.
2. You should warm it up. It works better that way. The bottle recommends that.
3. You can make your own by making hot hide glue and adding urea. I do that all the time. It's a lot cheaper.

I use it sometimes, it seems to work fine although I have not glued plates or braces with it.

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Steve Smith
"Music is what feelings sound like"

Where do u buy the urea that u use?

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Urea-Gel-Suppr ... 890.l49292

I bought this one.


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Brad, what is your recipe? Hide glue. urea, water? Cook time etc etc

The little container from Homestead Finishing is great. Jeff Jewitt, the owner/operator, is a guitar maker himself, and the author of some awesome finishing books. So, that's a good source.

The last time I bought urea, I wanted to get some larger quantities and spend less per ounce, so I bought this:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Urea-46-0-0-99 ... SwoudW4PRg

The pellets are slightly larger than what you get from Homestead Finishing, but they work fine, and buying a larger amount did save money.

Here is my recipe for an Old Brown Glue equivalent hide glue that is liquid at room temperature:

Distilled water 1.6 ounces
dry glue 1.0 ounces
Urea 0.3 ounces

Here is my process: I measure out the dry glue on my scale, in the container in which I will heat it. Then I add the water and let it soak in for a few minutes. When it is the consistency of tapioca and no water runs off when you turn it upside down, it is ready to cook. I cook the glue until it is liquid. Then I add the urea and let it cook until the urea is no longer in little pellets, but has dissolved into the glue. Then it's ready to use. I keep it warm as though it is regular hot hide glue, because it works better that way. But I don't freak out about it cooling and potentially gelling on me (thereby making it useless as glue), because the urea keeps that from happening.

I also add smaller ratios of urea when I just want to slow down the gelling instead of eliminate it. That works very well for things like gluing binding and gluing plates to sides.

Mike, I learned about it from Don. See his post above.


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I just started using Old Brown Glue. I don't have any prior experience using hide glue, so I can't compare the two. But I've used this stuff on various things and it seems to work pretty well. I use a lot of different glues in my shop, though. So if I forget to warm up the glue, I'll use fish glue. If I don't want to wait 12 hours for clamping, I will use titebond. Don't want to add water to the wood? Epoxy or gorilla glue.

I think I like the idea of Old Brown Glue because it takes the step out of the process. Oddly, I don't like mixing my own stuff (shellac, hide glue, etc), so a solution straight from a bottle is appealing to me.

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-Marcus
http://www.bailieguitars.com
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I think we all have our limits when it comes to levels of DIY, and they vary depending on how we each want to spend our time and energy. I build guitars (obviously), and I like making my own glue and some of my own tools, but I really, really don't want to harvest trees or dry my own lumber. I belong to a local woodworking club. Some of my fellow members get excited about a tree that some neighbor wants taken away. I've cut up trees for removal and/or firewood, and I never thought of it as a good time. To each her/his own. OBG is a fine product.

I’ve been around here a while. I’ve heard endless discussions about hide glue vs tite bond, etc. I don’t recall folks discussing liquid hide glue before. Aka OBG. I don’t mean tite bond hide glue. As near as I can tell, cured OBG has almost the same characteristics as hot hide glue. Maybe not quite as strong, but identically reversible. Why no one discuss this?

I've used it for box closing with good results, but I'll probably go back to regular HHG on my next one. I split my bottle of OBG up into several small squeeze bottles and froze them, but even then it may be too old by now. Plus I reheat the joint after getting the clamps on anyway, out of paranoia that it may not dry completely otherwise. The squeeze-out seems to form a waterproof surface film that prevents it from ever fully drying. But after reheating, it dries hard like regular HHG. I doubt the actual glue line is affected, since it's much thinner and not exposed to air, but I never got around to doing any testing to verify one way or the other.

EDIT: Just checked the FAQ on the OBG web site and they confirm that the glue line does dry faster than the squeeze-out. And the gummy squeeze-out does clean up much more easily than regular HHG, so that's actually an advantage. But another entry says "Clamp it right away, do not wait for the glue to gel, as that would not produce a good tight joint." which implies that reheating is indeed necessary for time consuming joints like box closing.

Mike--

Old Brown Glue comes up from time to time around here:

viewtopic.php?f=10101&t=53173&hilit=old+brown+glue

viewtopic.php?f=10137&t=52518&hilit=old+brown+glue

viewtopic.php?f=10137&t=52250&hilit=old+brown+glue

viewtopic.php?f=10101&t=51291&hilit=old+brown+glue

viewtopic.php?f=10101&t=51041&hilit=old+brown+glue

I have used OBG for furniture for a while. I glued 2 bridges with it about 2 years ago and they are both holding so far.

Ed M

If you are already doing HHG then just make it yourself. I use canning salt instead of urea in a ration that makes it so that the glue is rubbery solid at room temperature but a nice runny liquid at 140deg that gives me enough open time for difficult operations.

Like JF, I favor adding some amount of urea/salt less than what it takes to keep the glue liquid at room temperature. Slowing down the gelling of the glue gives me what I need the most, which is just a little more open time than regular HHG gives you. A little additive (salt or urea) doesn't do much harm to the glue; it really does just slow down the gelling. Adding enough additive to amount to 5-10% of the weight of the dry glue works really well.

But, there are some things where I like having it be fully liquid at room temperature, so that's when I use the 30% I recommended above.

This is why I like making my own glue. I can tweak it for the task at hand.

Fish glue!
You can freeze it if you buy to much.
Good tack & open time.

Mike

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Mike Collins

Just for folks how might be very interested in hide glue, an interesting talk by Yannick Chastang was hosted on a webchat
recently, these get uploaded on youtube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USAaGidBK_E

Patrick Edwards has some interesting videos to watch on fine woodworking also.
https://www.finewoodworking.com/videowo ... ck-edwards


Tom

I put my semi liquid hide glue in little glue bottles with a couple stainless steel nuts at the bottom and put in the refrigerator when not in use. Then I heat up my glue pot water bath to 140 with the bottle in and it's ready to go. Just grab the bottle out of the bath and use it.

This is a great thread. Thanks for the recipes!

On my past few guitars, I have used HHG for everything that ends up inside the box, save the back linings, which were affixed with fish glue. (The top gets tentallones and HHG.) I have been using fish glue to close the box and to affix purfling/binding combinations, and have not had any problems with adhesion. I've actually made a few guitars using fish glue for everything inside the box as well and not had any failures.

For a while, I thought fish glue was the perfect solution—and I'm sure it is for some. However, in my experience, when I've made a mistake and wanted to redo something, fish glue has not released as cleanly as HHG, leaving me with stains and damaged wood fibers to address. I'm not highly skilled at repairs and it may be that my own shortcomings in that area are at fault here.

Lately, I've been experimenting with Old Brown Glue as a replacement for fish and I like it. (I've not yet used it on an actual instrument.) Thanks to this thread, I think I'll get some canning salt and do a bit more testing. Learning new things is one of my favorite parts of this whole enterprise. So thanks again to you all for sharing your info and experience.

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George :-)

I've mixed Old Brown Glue into fresh HHG to increase my working time, I've also mixed in a few percent of salt to increase my working time.

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Jim Watts
http://jameswattsguitars.com

Happy to help share information about how to customize hide glue. One thing about the ratios I have mentioned: I only vouch for those ratios when working with urea. I don't know what ratios work well when using salt as the additive.

Interesting discussion!

I had never heard of "canning salt." According to the Internet (where eveything is True) canning salt, also called pickling salt, is pure sodium chloride, ground fine, without added iodine or anti-caking agents.

One site that goes into some detail:
https://cannednation.com/canning-kosher-himalayan-salt/

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Tim Allen
"Never hurry, never rest."

Right and that is why I specifically mentioned canning salt. While I don't know for a fact if regular salt with anti caking additives and Iodine and other additives has any effect on the glue why risk it? So I like to use the pure NaCL.