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I I had to remove the cocobolo veneer on the neck 8m building after noticing I had carved to far into the peghead. I thought, this is going to be painful as I used hot hide glue. No it popped right off. I now have can of acetone to clean it before I glue it on again. I also think I'm going to use Titebond, HHG is to much of a pain for me. Most of the time I don't spend more than 1 hour in my shop, so that takes up too much of my time.

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Hutch

Get the heck off the couch and go build a guitar!!!!

I have settled on PVA for everything except top / back braces & fretboard. For braces I use HHG and epoxy for the fretboard.

I use HHG on braces for repairability.

If you only have an hour at a time, and want repairability, maybe try fish glue?


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You should use what you are comfortable with, but let me say that, if you get your system ironed out, you can be up and running with fresh hot hide glue in about 15 minutes, starting from dry glue pellets.

I measure the dry glue by weight, in the inner pot of my double boiler glue pot. I keep it on the scale, and pour in the right amount of distilled water (again, measured by weight) to get the consistency I want. While that is soaking, I plug in my hot plate, and go fill up the outer pot of the double boiler with hot tap water. Usually by the time I am done messing around with the outer pot, the dry glue is fully saturated and ready to heat. I drop the inner pot into the outer pot, put them on the hot plate, and wait until the glue is hot. That gives me time to "dry run" the first glue job of this session. I keep checking the glue, and it is usually ready to go in a few minutes. If I need urea, I measure it and put it in, and wait for it to dissolve in the mixture.

Yes, a bottle on a shelf is faster, but I really like the benefits of hot hide glue, so I put up with the 15 minutes of prep time.

For repairability, pva is awesome. Having recently made a few to many resets, I found it to be very easy to undo both with steam or dry heat. Yes I have remove the old before we new but that's easy to do.

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Hutch

Get the heck off the couch and go build a guitar!!!!

Nothing wrong with TB. Hundreds of thousands of guitars out there built with it is a pretty strong testament to it's ability.

What I do with hide glue is mix it up so that it has more open time. I have a formula using kosher salt, distilled water and glue granules. The glue is liquid at 140 degrees but solid at room temp. But it takes about a minute to gel so I have plenty of working time for many operations. And I put it in a glue bottle that goes in the refrigerator at the end of the day. So a batch lasts me a month. Probably longer but that's all I give it.

HHG can be a pain in the sass and for folks not tooled up to use it it can suck valuable time too. We use it for where it makes sense and have no reservations using Titebond original (less than a year old) for other things and Fish glue at times too although Fish has fallen out of favor at our shop lately.

Lot's of superb instruments were built with Titebond Original only.

My advice is if there is any, any question that someone does not have the proper clamping, a perfectly prepared joint, preheated parts and the chops to have all clamps in place in say 15 seconds don't use HHG it's unforgiving on prep and set-up.